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  • [SOUNDS OF BIRDS CHIRPING]

  • Where are we? We're in Campbell Hall, New York.

  • [Laleh Khorramian, Artist]

  • It's about an hour and a half northwest of New York City.

  • [After 11 years living and working in New York City]

  • [Laleh's spent the last 9 months upstate.]

  • On a typical day, I get up at 7

  • and just work and make things and cook things

  • and be on the phone and do computer work

  • just like everyone else.

  • [New York Close Up]

  • [Music begins playing]

  • ["Laleh Khorramian's Epic Animations"]

  • [Music continues]

  • [Private studio -- Not an exit or entrance]

  • Always quite a bit of organizing...

  • This is only like a fraction of the scraps of paper

  • that I have and have worked with for years.

  • Look at this gem.

  • It's almost a joke with some friends who pick up scraps from the floor

  • and they're like, "You sure you don't need this?"

  • "You might need that."

  • When I was a teenager, I really wanted to learn how to paint.

  • Since I didn't really have any teachers at the time,

  • I just read about artists and how they did it,

  • and I would say ,"Well, I'll just do it how they did it."

  • You know, and that to just do a lot of drawings and repeat yourself.

  • So monotype was one way to do that: to just practice.

  • You basically paint on a surface

  • and you lay something else on top of that

  • and peel the paper away.

  • You just never knew what exactly you were going to get,

  • which is the aspect of it I really enjoyed.

  • To make a film,

  • I would always just have an idea of what the story vaguely would be.

  • I would scan the monotypes at a very high resolution--

  • searching these things for these crazy images that I would find

  • on a very micro level.

  • They were telling me the story.

  • The imagery that you find is so dramatic

  • ["Chopperlady" -- 2005]

  • and so fantastical.

  • It think it evokes a place that people want to be.

  • So, I'm interested in creating

  • ["Sophie and Goya" -- 2004]

  • my own stories in those settings.

  • I was born in Tehran, in Iran.

  • We emigrated to the United States when I was 2 years old.

  • Now, that's where I grew up--is Orlando, Florida.

  • I mean, I went 22 times as a kid to Disney.

  • If we had company come from out of town,

  • they wanted to go to Disney.

  • And then they would come and take me out of school,

  • which was a child's absolute dream.

  • Disney had a remarkable influence on my imagination.

  • And then I had an experience going when I was, I think, 19,

  • which everything changed,

  • and I just saw it as a whole, like, "cardboard" setup.

  • That had a remarkable effect on how I would look at everything else.

  • ["I Without End" -- 2008]

  • I don't have an instinct for directing.

  • That was one aspect of filmmaking that I just didn't work well with, was people.

  • And I always thought, "I would always love one day

  • to make a film with couples."

  • But it wasn't until many years later that I actually went,

  • "A ha, I know how I'm going to do it."

  • It's ridiculous using an orange peel to make an erotic film,

  • but somehow there is a resemblance.

  • I made it in my bedroom,

  • and I had three or four cameras sometimes.

  • I just set them on timers to shoot every 30 seconds.

  • I would go to sleep and I could hear the clicking.

  • I would wake up...you know, you're thinking about your children, you know,

  • and you hear them breathing, and I would just hear like,

  • "Click. Click. Click."

  • "Okay! Alright, everything is fine! Go back to sleep." [LAUGHS]

  • When I think about where the work comes from, I actually think of very dark things.

  • I'm definitely informed by destructive things around me,

  • ["Water Panics in the Sea" -- 2011]

  • or even in my own head.

  • But even Disney movies had dark sources, you know.

  • It didn't necessarily come across that way, but they did.

  • I like epic stories.

  • And, I think there's the epic in just about everything.

  • There's an epic story somewhere in everyone's realities,

  • even when we think nothing interesting is happening.

  • ["Liuto Golis" -- 2010]

  • When the works sort of get sometimes classified as 'fantasy'

  • I mean, I really don't see them as fantasy.

  • I guess I'm thinking about creating a certain atmosphere,

  • a certain place.

  • It's just proposing a different reality.

  • It's a world happening at the same time as this one.

  • We're just kind of peering in.

[SOUNDS OF BIRDS CHIRPING]

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