Upcoming Feature ‘Sea Change’ Uses Animation And Magical Realism To Explore Iran, Exile, And Inherited Trauma

What began as a partially animated story about Iran and exile will now unfold as a full-length feature.

Sea Change, the debut film from writer-director Leyla Pope, was initially conceived with only its Iran-set passages animated. That changed when producer Amy Morris at Wales’ Winding Snake Productions suggested using the medium for the whole film, opening the door for Pope and her collaborators to move more freely between past and present, reality and imagination.

Tracing the emotional aftershocks of the 1979 Iranian Revolution across generations, Sea Change asks what becomes of a family’s memories of home after that home has been left behind. Rather than treating displacement as a single historical rupture, Sea Change shows how its effects can resurface in the lives of children who did not experience the original event.

Pope said she did not immediately recognize that theme in her own screenplay:

Sea Change came from a personal place. The first draft wrote itself. It was only on rereading it that I saw I was writing about the trauma of exile passed down through generations. People exiled from their homeland can appear seamlessly integrated, but so much of their emotional energy stays tied to the place they’ve left… Sea Change explores how the burden of caring for parents who never quite settle falls to the next generation. The trauma shifts shape, but it continues.”

Animating the full film allowed Pope to approach those ideas through magical realism, using images that shift and transform as memories, places, and emotions begin to overlap. Illustrative animator Efa Blosse-Mason and character designer and animator Tad Davies are developing its visual language, which combines intimate character work with more surreal expressions of the characters’ inner lives.

“I work with refugees and have profound respect for their resilience,” Pope said. “I’d like audiences to come away with a deeper understanding of the pull refugees and immigrants navigate daily, between moving forward and carrying the weight of loss.”

The film is currently in production at Winding Snake Productions, with Morris producing and support from the Ffilm Cymru Wales BFI Network Beacons program.

Its voice cast features three-time BAFTA Cymru winner Sharon Morgan, Beyond Paradise actor Zahra Ahmadi, and Iranian-born writer, journalist, and broadcaster Kamin Mohammadi. Mohammadi left Iran with her family following the revolution and later explored that experience in her book The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter to Iran.

Sea Change is set to be completed in early 2027, after which the producers plan to take it to international film festivals.