Inspired by an ancient Hormoz Island myth in which people sacrifice clothes of the deceased to the sea so that the goddess Sea-Mother will cleanse their souls, Janbal takes stories told by the island’s dwellers as its starting point and playfully finds its form from there.

Musa is enchanted by the sounds of the sea. He collects clothes from its shore to create pictorial visions of the Sea-Daughter; he plays the jahleh (clay pot) to keep alive the sound of her voice; he writes stories.

Directed by celebrated video and performance duo Mina Bozorgmehr and Hadi Kamali Moghadam, Janbal takes cinematic storytelling to realms rarely explored, blurring the real and the imaginative in a richly textured and poetic form that is inventive, rhythmic, and visually out-of-this-world.