Private Project

PHOSPHENIC_SUN [PLAY ▸]

An unfinished and partially abandoned video-poem assembled from digitized VHS tapes recorded in Iran in 1998. Created during a period of severe depression in the winter of 2025, the film drifts through decaying home-video footage, AI-generated phosphenes, and reflections on childhood sunlight, memory, and magnetic media.

As old tapes are restored and color-corrected, the distinction between memory and hallucination begins to collapse. What emerges is less a documentary than an unstable emotional archive: an attempt to reconstruct the warmth of a forgotten noon through damaged images, compression artifacts, and synthetic light.

The project remains intentionally unresolved, suspended somewhere between restoration and disappearance.

  • Parham Ghalamdar
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Other
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 30 seconds
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Iran, United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    Iran, United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English, Persian
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Parham Ghalamdar

Parham Ghalamdar is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in the UK. His work moves across painting, film, writing, ceramics, and AI-generated imagery, tracing forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse into one another. Drawing on cybernetic theory, generative AI, and machine vision, he explores how feedback systems, simulation, and media technologies shape our understanding of history, violence, and possible futures.

His recent solo exhibitions include Painting, An Unending at HOME, Manchester, and Deep Desert Objekt at Pipeline Contemporary, London. His work has been shown at Caustic Coastal, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Castlefield Gallery, the Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery, and The Lowry. He has received the UK New Artists bursary, an ACE Project Grant, a DYCP grant, and other awards. His work is held in the Government Art Collection.

In 2025, Ghalamdar directed THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, an experimental short that burns over fifty of his own paintings as a “funeral for the image.” The film has screened at more than fifty festivals and art platforms, including Braziers International Film Festival, Bristol Radical Film Festival, Darkroom Festival, CosmiX IV, Millennium Film Workshop, and Open Secret. It received Best Short Documentary at Gjon Mili International Video Art Festival.

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