A flexible identity and a series of thirty-two posters for the annual film festival, each one generated from a single rotating aperture motif that opens and closes across the season.
Film festivals live and die on their posters. They have to read at the scale of a city wall and at the scale of a phone screen, often on the same day. We proposed a system rather than a single image — an aperture, made of six rotating blades, that opens a little further for each section of the programme.
The aperture is drawn from a single geometric construction — a hexagonal star of the kind you find cut into lattice windows across Iran. By rotating its six blades we generated thirty-two unique compositions, one per programme strand, each one balanced on the same central axis. The colour shifts: documentary runs cold and teal, the competition strand runs ember-red, the retrospective runs saffron.
"The aperture is the only honest metaphor for cinema. Everything else is decoration."
The identity rolled out across Tehran in February 2024 — on Metro pillars, on the festival's four main venues, and across a printed catalogue of 240 pages. We held the type to two faces: a condensed display for titles, set in Persian and Latin at matched cap heights, and a clean grotesque for information.
Attendance that year was the highest on record. The identity was retained for the 2025 edition and extended into a year-round members' programme.
