Film essay, 12 min 30 sec, 2026
Commissioned by the Museum of Humour and Satire, Gabrovo
Curated by Snejana Krasteva
Produced for Brieftopia: Art between Crisis and Imagination
Brieftopia, Three or More Fools is a speculative film essay structured as a letter to the Iranian cartoonist Kambiz Derambakhsh (1942–2021). The film moves between Derambakhsh’s drawings in the archive of the Museum of Humour and Satire, Noori’s childhood memories of Donyo Donev’s animation The Three Fools, and the political conditions under which the work was made.
The letter constructs a relation between two artists who never met. It addresses Derambakhsh after his death, but does not claim to recover his voice or complete his history. Instead, the film works with drawings, memories, archival traces and acts of narration to ask what kind of connection remains possible when bodies cannot move freely across borders.
Here, the letter becomes a Brieftopian form: a temporary space in which an interrupted relation acquires material and imaginative presence. It is neither a reconstruction of the past nor an escape from the present. Its possibility remains fragile, incomplete and exposed to the historical conditions surrounding it.
The film was completed as the war involving Iran, Israel and the United States intensified. Noori subsequently revised its ending in response to the destruction and the altered conditions under which the work would be encountered. The revision does not turn the film into a record of the war. Instead, it acknowledges how political catastrophe enters personal memory, changes the meaning of existing images and interrupts the futures imagined through them.
The installation brings the film into dialogue with original cartoons by Derambakhsh from the museum’s collection. Presented publicly for the first time, the drawings demonstrate the economy of his visual language. Through sparse lines, recurring figures and recognisable symbols, Derambakhsh addressed war, authority, bureaucracy and the contradictions of everyday life without reducing them to a single political message.
Credits
Film and installation: Behzad Khosravi Noori
Commissioned by: Museum of Humour and Satire, Gabrovo
Curator: Snejana Krasteva
Exhibition: Brieftopia: Art between Crisis and Imagination
Year: 2026
