A Longitudinal Observational Project
HEYDAR IN FIRE: PART III (2021)
In a neighborhood of Sedeh, Isfahan, a centuries-old mourning ritual continues to be organized entirely by its community. For generations, it has marked a moment after Ashura solemn, intense, sometimes harsh yet also functioning as the only large-scale public gathering the town knows.
The first film was made in 2005, under local expectations for a religious interpretation. Although the filmmaker was not a believer, a devotional version was negotiated and distributed on DVD within the city. It became part of the town’s visual record.
A second film followed in 2009, shifting attention from doctrine to lived experience: children moving through smoke, laughter beneath banners of mourning, the uneasy coexistence of grief and vitality. The ceremony revealed itself not only as ritual, but as the town’s only annual space for gathering, play, and visibility.
In 2021, the filmmaker returns again.
Some faces seen in earlier films are no longer alive. Others have aged. New participants now inhabit the fire and the structure of mourning. The ritual persists, but its meaning and energy continue to transform.
This third installment does not reinterpret the ceremony theologically. Instead, it observes continuity and rupture how collective memory survives through repetition, how generations reshape inherited forms, and how a filmmaker confronts images he once created under social expectation.
The film was produced for local viewing inside the community in which it was made. It functions less as explanation and more as return: to a place, to a ritual, and to a personal history embedded in both.
Mobarez Javanmard
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