FANAAn evolving story universe by Rita Rahimi.
A ruined Tehran. A dying regime. The living and the dead sharing the same broken city.
At the heart of FANA are ordinary people navigating extraordinary absurdity, violence, love, and survival.
An expanding universe of interconnected stories, characters, films, comics, music, and visual art.
What remains when everything that defines us disappears?
The name fanā comes from a concept of self-dissolution deeply rooted in Persian mystical and artistic traditions.
For Rita, it is a lifelong artistic exploration of identity, loss, transformation, and the possibility of becoming someone new.
Across different stories and mediums, FANA returns to the same question: Who are we when the world and the self we once knew falls apart?
The world is ending. Life goes on.
Bombs fall. The dead walk among the living. An authoritarian regime struggles to control a city it can barely keep alive.
And yet people still fall in love, make music, break rules, tell jokes, and dream of something better.
FANA is a world where the absurd and the tragic are inseparable.
THE CHARACTERS
A rebel without an off switch.
An artist, a dreamer, and a compulsive rule-breaker. Ahu drives through forbidden streets, makes a living outside the law, and refuses to surrender her freedom even when the world around her collapses.
She is the heart of FANA.
MEET AHU
The perfect citizen the system forgot.
Conservative, cautious, and almost painfully obedient, Adil has spent years admiring Ahu from a distance.
A bureaucratic mistake has made him invisible to the surveillance system. When their paths finally cross, two radically different ways of surviving the same nightmare collide.
Three old villagers. Traditional instruments. Heavy metal.
A fictional Iranian rock band whose absurd humor and rebellious music have found their way into FANA.
Ahu is a fan. Their songs, characters, and adventures are becoming part of the universe.
BEYOND THE SCREEN
2024 · Shamis Gallery, Tehran
FANA took physical form in a two-floor interdisciplinary exhibition combining original drawings, comics, moving images, projection mapping, and installation.
A world that began on paper expanded into a space audiences could walk through.
EXPLORE THE EXHIBITION
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
2019 · Original Graphic Novel · 150 Pages
Before FANA became a cinematic universe, it lived on paper.
An intimate, hand-drawn journey through identity, memory, dreams, and transformation. Across three interconnected episodes, Rita and Ahu navigate a surreal world of emotional contradictions, dark humor, and the difficult process of self-acceptance.
A Maple in Flames established an early visual and narrative foundation for the universe that continues to evolve today.
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