VSFF '25 | 'Unibrow' Director Nedda Sarshar On The Power of Short Film and "Messy Diaspora" Stories

The Vancouver Short Film Festival starts today! It's going to be a fantastic weekend for all short film lovers (myself included) in the city. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity this week to speak with Nedda Sarshar, a Toronto-based writer/director whose film Unibrow is featured in this years fest.

When I sat down to watch Unibrow, I knew I was in for something special from the very start. If you've ever been a young girl, you're probably familiar with the sinking feeling of looking into the bathroom mirror after failing attempts to "fix" your appearance. I know I am. I've spent many mornings staring at my red, pockmarked reflection, cursing my tweezers, when really, I only had myself to blame.

In Leyla's (Lina Sennia) case, the culprit isn't tweezers, but a dermaplaner. Trying to tame her unibrow one morning before school, Leyla only succeeds in making things worse, and must face the day with an angry red mark on her face. Through Nedda Sarshar's lens though, her waking nightmare becomes a tender and achingly relatable exploration of self-acceptance, culture, and the importance of community.

"Unibrow was a story I made to speak to the loneliness period of my life, when I was an adolescent who felt like I was a piece in the wrong puzzle," says Sarshar. Her experiences growing up as an Irani-Canadian were at the heart of this project, inspiring Leyla's story about the messiness of the immigrant experience, and what it is like to grow up feeling like an 'outsider.' Sarshar wanted to tell a story that so many know from experience, but is rarely represented on screen. "Growing up, I thought I was alone in feeling like I had to build a barrier between my home life and my public life," says Sarshar. With Unibrow, she shows how those walls can be broken down.

The film manages to find a balance between the deeply personal and the universal. Everyone has felt the tension between self-acceptance and the desire to fit in, never more pointedly felt than in the classrooms of adolescence. Speaking about the experience of bringing the story to life, Sarshar reflected on the unique power of the short film to tell contained stories. In contrast to a feature, she said that the medium of the short improved the film by forcing her to create an economical narrative, giving the utmost attention to the tiniest detail. "[Short film] gives you a slice of life, and sometimes you only really need that," she said.

That's exactly how Unibrow feels. It's a window into Leyla's life, into the cultural barriers she is navigating as she moves between her spaces at home and in public. The tension between her cultural identity and the Western context she exists in is constant, but for Leyla—and for Sarshar—the way to resolve that tension is by finding community. Filmmaking itself is a collaborative art, and especially when telling stories so deeply rooted in her own experiences, Sarshar says that her community on and off of set is integral. She states,

“I am who I am because of the Irani women in my life. This film is a love letter to them, and [it was incredible] to be surrounded by others who not only represented those women, but also understood how important it was to value these characters.”

In Unibrow, Leyla is confronted with the varied nature of community and culture that Sarshar loves to explore in her work. Leyla, a second generation Irani-Canadian, is trying to distance herself from her Iranian identity, reluctant to even speak Farsi at home. When she arrives at school, a new student has joined her class. Suddenly, here is Sahar (Parastoo Amanzadeh), a girl from her home country who speaks with an Iranian accent and has a completely different relationship to their shared culture than Leyla does. Sarshar is endlessly fascinated by this exact multiplicity. She wants to continue to explore the myriad of "messy diaspora stories" that are part of growing up in the ripples of the immigrant experience.

Sashar also knows how important it is to include those different perspectives in the creative process itself. "Having that diversity in both our crew and cast was, I think, essential to making Unibrow as resonant as it has come to be," she said. She highlighted how valuable it was to have her assistant director giving instructions in Farsi on set, or to gather in her grandmother's apartment in "Tehranto" with some key cast and crew to discuss the script, and bring fresh eyes to the story. "It was magical," she says, "I wish that experience for everyone."

In a story that is so much about beauty standards and fitting in, the focus on eyebrows specifically was far from random. As Sarshar explains, eyebrows have a long history as a medium of personal expression and political statement in Iranian culture. In a place where women's hair is covered by the mandatory hijab, their brows become a source of self-expression. For Leyla, the problem isn't with her brows themselves, but a deeper discomfort with who she is. Her relationship with both is complex, and evolves over the course of the film.

Sarshar says that finally understanding this part of the narrative is what broke Unibrow wide open for her. "I think there would have been an unearned simplicity with just having Leyla love her unibrow and decide to wear it," she says. Only through conversations within her community did she begin to ask herself what the real issue at the heart of the story was. The push and pull of an identity defined by two places, two cultures, two contexts.

There is beauty in simplicity, and with Unibrow, Nedda Sarshar uses a simple story to expose something more complex: the beautiful, exhausting and messy work of finding identity through cultures and expectations. "It's very fertile soil for storytelling," she says. Learning to love and balance all the parts of yourself is central to the film and its making. For Sarshar, telling these stories is an endless source of joy. "I'm obsessed," she says. And after seeing Unibrow, so am I.

You can check out Unibrow this Sunday, June 15th at 12pm at the SFU Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema. For more infor about the short or any other screenings at VSFF '25 check out the link below. Who knows what new stories you might discover!

https://vsff.eventive.org/schedule