Sevdaliza – Darkest Hour
2019 · Directed by Sarah Benjamin & An Simin
60K Likes
Best comments
1.“She looks like she's sitting in a cup of matcha. Beautiful.”
More comments
- 2.“Sevdaliza really said, 'I'm giving y'all diversity whether you like it or not.'”
- 3.“As a mom, I'm so happy my dear daughter was invited to be part of this, along with all these beautiful, interesting women.”
The story
No film crew. No studio. The Darkest Hour video was made entirely on webcams and phones, Sevdaliza's own scenes included. Directors Sarah Benjamin and An Simin spent months tracking down women around the world from a distance and collecting their home-made clips – a barber in London, a student in India, a shop owner in Berlin, a teacher in New York, a mother and daughter in Venezuela. The cast list in the YouTube description reads like a stack of passport stamps: Yerevan, Jerusalem, Cairo, Dehradun, Brooklyn, Nîmes, Los Angeles.
The faces sit close to the lens, cropped tight like a video call, in bedrooms, bathrooms, cars and gyms, on shorelines and snowy roads. A mother rocks her child. Couples hold each other. Then the women scream, dance and laugh, and at the very end Sevdaliza rises out of the mud. Armenian model Armine Harutyunyan and Senegalese-American photographer Soukayna Dieng are in the mix, but most of the cast are just women living their lives.
Sevdaliza was born in Tehran, moved to the Netherlands at five and played for the Dutch national women's basketball team before music took over. Darkest Hour first came out as a single in March 2019 and later landed on digital copies of her album Shabrang (Persian for "night color"). The video followed in March 2021, timed to Women's History Month as a tribute to women everywhere. Shot on phones by strangers in the middle of a pandemic, and it still feels closer than most things made with a real budget.
