قاصدک / Qasedak / Dandelion
Duration: 3 mins 55s
Directed and Animated by: Naghmeh Sharifi
Sound Design: Nick Lavigne
Original Score: Naeim Jebelli, Pouya Mahmoudi
Dandelion (Qasedak) is an animated audiovisual meditation inspired by the poem of the same name by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, one of the central figures of modern Persian poetry. Written under Akhavan-Sales' own bitterly ironic pen name "M. Omid" ("M. Hope"), the poem addresses a qasedak, the dandelion's floating seed-tuft, long treated in Persian folklore as a small messenger carrying a wish, only to refuse its news outright, declaring that hope itself has been exhausted.
The film follows a woman collecting and releasing fallen seeds, an act of revival for journeys cut short, recasting the poem's refusal of hope into a quiet, repeated gesture of persistence. Created in the wake of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, the work serves as an homage to voices denied resonance. Through the symbolic act of gathering and releasing, Qasedak transforms personal grief into a modular installation that resists erasure, bridging the gap between cinema and gallery.
The original score, sung in Farsi, sets an excerpt of the poem to music; it is left deliberately unsubtitled in the film to prevent a singular reading of the piece.