#1783: “Less Than 5gr of Saffron” Wins 2nd Place Prize at Venice Immersive with Spatial Poem Quill Animation

I interviewed Négar Motevalymeidanshah & Gwenaelle Clauwaert about Less Than 5gr of Saffron on Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.

Here is the story synopsis for Less Than 5gr of Saffron:

"Golnaz is a young Iranian immigrant trying to adjust to her new life in Germany. One evening, returning from her job (as an assistant at a migrant reception centre in the Berlin suburbs), she is starving, and her refrigerator is empty. She decides to go to the nearest supermarket. The supermarket has just received a new product: saffron. Even though it is very expensive for her, she cannot resist: she buys a packet of saffron. Emotions overwhelm her. She feels the need to cook a home-cooked meal to help her overcome her homesickness. She prepares rice and adds saffron, a comfort food from her past. But she never expected that this moment would plunge her back into the most traumatic events of her life. Most notably, three years ago, she survived a tragic drowning that took her family while traveling illegally by boat."

Here are the contextual domains that are explored:

Exile and being a refugee [12]. Takes place in a new [4] home far from home [9] whose memory of family who died [8] all brought back through the embodied experience of food and saffron [1]. "The project evokes our capacity to identify profoundly with a survivor by placing her in a universally familiar-preparing a meal."

Here is the Elemental Center of Gravity:

1st Center of Gravity of Earth Element / Environmental and Embodied Presence: Quinitessential and paradigmatic example of spatial storytelling taking through a variety of immersive and spatial contexts with seamless transitions and edits. Also switches between 3rd person and 1st person POV2nd Center of Gravity of Water Element / Emotional Presence: Like living within a Lucid Dream, very dynamic, poetic. It's cut to music, and so it very much has a music video type pacing and rhythm. Some really elegant spatial transitions, and powerful moments that use metaphors that were just extremely visceral and moving. The piece very much relies upon flashbacks and memories of traumatic moments of escaping authoritarian contexts. So you start off in the mudance context of a kitchen from a first-person POV, but then upon smelling the saffron spice, then it immediately transports you into these violent memories of being an exiled refugee. It's also farily brief, and so short and sweet.3rd Center of Gravity of Air Element / Mental