Our Uniform

This film is not, it is stressed at the start, an attack on those who wish to wear the hijab. It’s a personal reflection on the experience of being obliged to wear one in Iran, and most particularly at school. It’s less a meditation on the politics associated therewith than on the feeling created by clothing, the self expression it can enable and the subtler cultural effects of having clothing choices made by other people instead of oneself.

Shortlisted for a Best Animated Short Oscar, the film uses clothing to tell the story, with the action taking place on or around pieces of clothing. A bus runs along an embroidered ribbon. A hand reaches out of a pocket. Denim and fluffy jumpers and loose folds of fabric provide a flexible backdrop which folds and unfolds to reveal secrets. It’s a lively, innovative technique which directly connects style and subject and also facilitates a playful wit. Dogmatism is always rife with absurdity, and never more so that in the context of a school, where rules are rarely taken seriously, so director Yegane Moghaddam has plenty of material.

If a girl’s uniform is determined by her gender but boys get more choices, what does that mean about the rest of her life? The narrator reflects that in another life she might have been something else, like a truck driver, but here she is a female – that is the whole of her role. The uniform tells children how to think of themselves, irrespective of whether or not anyone else is watching. At home, or in private places, acts of rebellion occur.

Our heroine likes to travel, she tells us. She loves the colours and the textures of people in different places. We see a row of feet with different garb, all suggesting different personalities. With the remained of the bodies invisible, we are invited to react to the clothing, to absorb its semantic value. To understand the effect of the absence of colour and texture and the visible self.