Iran, My Love - screening #1

Journey of no Return by Mitra Tabrizian (1993, 23′)

A woman with ‘no name and no country’ in search of a sense of belonging. Asked to write a script about her own experience, she constructs an ‘autobiography’ which is partly fiction. A photographer – who has never touched a camera. A peep-show girl who has never worked in one. A screenwriter who has never written dialogue.

Meanwhile, her unsent letters to her father echo the questions every migrant is asked: ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘When are you going back?’

The film is a critique of certain aspects of British culture & addresses crises of identity.

Mothers Apricot Compote by Nia Fekri (2020, 23′)

A fragmentary narrative of two women whose lives are distant from each other yet hold traces of one another. This film conjures the ghosts that hover over the day to day lives of these two women; it is a rumination on the experience of the immigrant within and without the diaspora and the ways in which personal/familial memory seeps through the surface of every day life.

Away by Parisa Aminolahi (2013, 15′)

Away tells the story of a young couple who move from Iran to the Netherlands. The woman tries to explore the new environment and adapt herself to it. However, the contrast between where they came from and where they now live, their isolation and being away from family and friends, make the woman dispirited and homesick. The memories and nostalgia for the country encourage the woman to abandon reality, by sleeping and, thus, living in her dreams, but a peculiar phenomenon threatens her life…