Oscar-Nominated Iranian Filmmaker Yegane Moghaddam Announces Next Short, Shares Teaser (EXCLUSIVE)

Iranian filmmaker Yegane Moghaddam is back with a new independent animated short that expands on themes she previously explored in her Oscar-nominated short, Our Uniform, and we’re thrilled to exclusively debut the first teaser for Our Body Language, a 12-minute mixed-media film combining clay and 2D animation.

Moghaddam describes the film as “the story of a town and its people told entirely through body language. A silent language with its own vocabulary, grammar, rhythms, memories, and possible futures.”

Centered on the human body and the social and political forces embedded within it, the film explores “gesture, movement, conformity, and social behavior through a largely wordless narrative.” The project also incorporates music through “an entirely a cappella soundtrack composed from human voices,” extending the film’s physical focus into its sound design.

At the center of the story is “the evolution of a young girl into a woman, as her body gradually shifts from being fluid, elastic, and playful into something increasingly stiff, controlled, and rigid.”

Moghaddam conceived the film as the starting point for a larger project focused on human interaction through physical behavior and nonverbal communication.

“The project is totally independent and conceived as the beginning of a larger episodic world exploring human power dynamics primarily through body language,” she explained. “Each story would take place in different social environments — schools, teenage spaces, cafeterias, buses, workplaces — observing how people communicate control, desire, fear, conformity, intimacy, and resistance through posture, gesture, rhythm, and physical presence rather than dialogue.”

While the short draws heavily from Iranian culture and social experience, Moghaddam said the concept expanded significantly during production.

“This first film is rooted in the culture I come from, Iran, but while developing the project and experimenting with the possibilities of clay animation, I realized the concept could expand endlessly into many different human situations and societies,” she said. “The body carries history, politics, class, gender, religion, shame, and longing before words even begin.”

That focus on physical presence also shaped the filmmaker’s thinking about technology and modern life.

“What interests me is creating an episodic project that draws attention to the subtlety of being human and to the experience of existing inside a body,” Moghaddam said. “In a world increasingly dominated by AI-powered technologies, it’s becoming more important to ask what actually defines us as human beings and what still separates us from machines. Through body language, the project encourages viewers to become more aware of the many details embedded in everyday human encounters that often go unnoticed.”

Production on the film was delayed several times, “due to the illegal war against Iran by the U.S., which disconnected me from part of my crew in Iran and disrupted the entire flow of the project.”

“Emotionally, it also became difficult to continue working while watching innocent civilians and the country I come from endure violence and destruction from afar,” she added. “In many ways, these events only deepened the film’s focus on vulnerability, control, and the human body under pressure.”

Moghaddam expects the film to be completed by the end of July.

Her previous short, Our Uniform, Iran’s first-ever animation Oscar nominee, was recently picked as a Vimeo Staff Pick and is now available to watch online.