A tale of a mysterious creature’s journey to Earth and an unknown person’s endless attempts to find it.
Dawning Dust (2026) is a hybrid essay film constructed from 35mm photography, pinhole images, MiniDV footage, archival material, and found footage. Its subject is an unnamed creature making a voyage to Earth, and an unidentified person’s repeated attempts to find it. Neither is ever shown. The film exists entirely in the space between the search and the searched-for.
The creature is deliberately undefined — a figure for the things we pursue without certainty of their existence: a purpose, an answer, a version of ourselves we believe is reachable. The person searching is a universal rather than a character. Their failure to find the creature is not a narrative weakness but the film’s central statement: that the act of searching is itself what gives shape to uncertainty, and that shape is sometimes all we get.
The film emerged from a period of personal uncertainty and took two years to develop — from first images shot on a pinhole camera in the Iranian countryside to a final structure that layers different image-times and formats against each other. The collision of analog still photography, moving image, and archival material is not nostalgic; it is an attempt to make visible the texture of something that resists definition.
Dawning Dust is a personal film that tries to become a shared one.