Rob Munday
An all-out action short, inspired by the real-life accounts of London’s Iranian community, The Tunnel immerses its audience in a race against the clock as three desperate refugees attempt to cross from France to England via the channel tunnel. A film with dual impact, Arash Ashtiani’s short shines a light on the life-or-death situations many will have to endure in the search of a better existence, while also showcasing the filmmaker’s impressive directorial flair.
With only the first 90-seconds of his short set outside of the eponymous tunnel, Ashtiani amplifies the claustrophobic, perilous setting by having his three protagonists not only battle time, in a race to get to safe points as trains tear past at breakneck speed, they also have to sneak past workers and fight the growing tensions within the group to survive. We don’t often see short films so dedicated to action and The Tunnel doesn’t seem interested in complex backstories for it characters, if anything, knowing so little about them helps to highlight the fact that this is a situation faced by so many, on a regular basis.
Ashtiani and his team created a tunnel set and employed scale model trains to build the authentic on-screen world of The Tunnel.
With the understanding that this is a story grounded in reality, the stakes are obviously high throughout The Tunnel and Ashtiani uses all the filmmaking tools available to him to ensure the film captures this tension. Speaking to S/W about his production, the director explained how they built a set of a cross section of the Euro tunnel and then used “a huge mirror at one end to form some camera trickery” so that their tunnel looked double the actual size. To make the scenes more dynamic, DP Nick Morris came up with the idea to use an LED screen with looped footage and have the cast run on a travelator, to get the sense of the frantic movements that would be involved in the real life situation.
For the film to be successful though, you really had to believe this trio were in grave danger from the approaching trains and Ashtiani casts the vehicle almost like a fourth character – a villain hunting them down – in his film. To ensure these scenes were believable, Production Designer, Mike McLoughlin came up with the idea to create a scale model of the Euro Tunnel and use a Hornby Eurostar train model, which they shot with a “tiny lens” (a process the director described as “magic”). They then took this footage and worked with an “incredible VFX studio”, who helped to “lengthen many of the shots of the train traveling through the tunnel”. Overall, the production of The Tunnel is hugely impressive, certainly equal to what you’d expect to find in a feature, and credit there has to go to the team at Griffin Pictures, who got a lot out their tight budget.
Shortlisted for the Best Short Film BAFTA in 2022, The Tunnel was released as a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere at the end of June 2022. Speaking to Ina Pira for that premiere, Ashtiani reveals he’s now working on a feature length version of this short and has a feature length documentary about Esmaeel Khoei, an exiled Iranian poet, set for release in October this year.