Mostafaei: end the death penalty

In September 2011 I was commissioned by Amnesty International and Guardian Films to direct a short animated documentary about juvenile executions in Iran, which would be a pivotal part of a viral internet campaign. The research for the project was based on a four hour Skype interview which I conducted with exiled Iranian human rights defence lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei. Working with writer Afarin Eghbal I produced a 5 minute script that was a distillation of the interview. The script describes firstly how Mostafaei’s childhood experience of poverty and abuse motivated him to become a human rights lawyer and secondly how he defended a young man who had been charged with murder at the age of 17 and witnessed his hanging under sharia law by the parents of his victim. I made drawn sketches based on the script which over a three week period were made into an animatic. This was followed by a 2 month animation production period. The completed project demonstrates how animation can be used as a tool to present harrowing and hard to obtain information in a palatable form to a global audience.