Lost in Tartarus
 

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2021

Stop motion/ Sand animation

7:41 min

Animation and sound: Elham Hadian

Music : Ramyar Talebi

 

 

In an underground the sandman is struggling to find a way out but he just forced to unending effort and bare repetition. The story of the animation is loosely based on the ancient Greek mythology; “Sisyphus”.

As a punishment to the crime, Sisyphus was exile to the deep abyss place named TARTARUS, forever to try to roll a large stone to the top of a mountain, which no matter how many times he nearly succeeded in his attempt, it would always roll back to the bottom. Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."

Camus sees Sisyphus as the absurd hero who lives life to the fullest, hates death, and is condemned to a meaningless task. Instead of despairing, Camus imagined Sisyphus defiantly meeting his fate as he walks down the hill to begin rolling the rock again. And even if the daily struggles of our lives sometimes seem equally repetitive and absurd, we still give them significance and value by embracing them as our own.