Review 3. Khoda

Khoda
Director. Reza Dolatabadi
Duration. 5 minutes

Even in the mind, is escape ever possible?

What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film that would meet the filmmakers' high personal standards
Khoda has a very strong narrative structure, so in this way it is easy to identify what is happening. There are concepts throughout the video but they are not easy to identify.
Concepts are the meanings hidden by a video's narration.

At the beginning of the video it pans across some land. The land is very cartoonistic and surreal, it is very colourful and looks peaceful. We then see a house in birds eye view. A woman appears and we are taken into her eye where the scene changes.

The scene is now a cell, this is easy to see from bars on the window, a bed in the corner and the feeling of loneliness and cold that this image makes us feel. The room is dark and dingy with only a small ray of light shining through the window onto where the man is standing. I think that the ray of light symbolises hope, that one day he will be on the other side. I think it is a very strong and powerful image.
He then begins digging at the ground with a spoon, we see his longing and enthusiasm for wanting to escape by his vigarous actions, this makes us feel sorrow for him.
The man steps onto the hole and as his foot hits the ground grass grows around his feet, the grass starts spreading across his cell and we then see him in a field in front of the house from the beginnning of the movie. I think that when he stepped onto the hole that this was him stepping into the outside world and into his new life.
The image then turns to his face and everything turns red. He screams with rage and is backed against a wall. The next image is through his eyes at masked men pushing and restraining him. One is trying to put a needle into him until he takes it and sticks it into the masked mans neck.
One image in this scene is of a man whos face we do not see but he is wearing a suit, is large and pulls out a cigar. He matches a very strereotypical gangster so from this we percieve him as the leader.
After sticking a needle into the mans neck, the scene turns to him runnning looking behind him as he does so, as he is being followed by the masked people. This scene is in black and white and as they run they look as though parts of their bodies are breaking off into blocks.
This could be seen as though the more they run the more exhausted they get and are effort is deterierating or as speed blurs shown as chipped blocks.
The last scene he is in an apartment with an amazing view of a city. He begins to walk up to the window and as he does so is reflection changes into different people but only slightly.
I think that maybe this could resemble all the people that he had wronged or was running from.

The craft in this piece is amazing, it is all painted images, over 6000 of them and they are all very realistic. There was a lot of time taken to produce this piece. The pictures are very scratchy but i think that it adds to the realism.