Shirin Raban was just beginning work on her thesis, a short film about Persians’ observations of Passover in Los Angeles, when she decided to take on the Student Voices Short Film Contest.

Raban is a master’s candidate in visual anthropology at USC with a background in graphic design. Another contestant in the Student Voices contest, Syuzanna Petrosyan, told Raban and her anthropological media seminar classmates about Student Voices and showed them some of her own work-in-progress.

Raban said the contest interested her because of her own Iranian and Jewish background, and she thought she may be able to use Shoah Foundation testimonies in her thesis film about generational and cultural differences in how Persians celebrate Passover in Los Angeles.

She ended up finding many testimonies with discussions of how survivors celebrated Passover before the war, and though she didn’t end up using them in her Student Voices film because they didn’t fit with the contest’s suggested themes, they were extremely useful for her thesis, Raban said. The testimonies taught her that Persians and Europeans celebrate Passover the same way.

“That opened a whole new window into my film to really understand that it’s old world versus new world rather than Iranian versus American. It’s tradition versus modernity,” Raban said. “That’s a topic I’m now interested in.”

While searching for Passover testimonies, Raban found the testimony of Naumi Alcalay and was inspired by her dramatic story of survival in Bulgaria.

“I felt like I knew that woman. I felt like she’s my grandmother. She had such a sense of humor,” Raban said. “Everyone wanted to help [her and her family], people they didn’t know on the street, on the train. It was really remarkable. I was really touched.”

Raban found time running out to complete her film and decided to improvise from her original idea of creating artwork to accompany Alcalay’s testimony. She began taking photos of different textures she found outside and in her home that reminded her of Alcalay’s testimony, and then drew pictures over the textures.

The process of making the artwork mirrored some of the themes in Alcalay’s testimony, Raban said.

“There was an element of tension in me doing it and an element of desperation in me doing it,” Raban said. “Doing the artwork was symbolic of putting me in a position of more intimately connecting with the character I’m depicting by realizing that in life you don’t always have the luxury of time.”

Now that her film, titled There is No Other Way, is complete, Raban feels she was able to raise awareness of the Holocaust in her own community by sharing her film with friends and family. Not enough people watch testimony, she said, and being able to do so, and becoming so intimately acquainted with Alcalay’s story, was an “amazing” opportunity.

“What I took away from it was to look at the human condition and realize it’s those little everyday moments that become grand,” she said.