Things We Do Not Say

Ali Razi / Iran, France / 2018 / World Premiere / 52 min.

synopsis

A video diary by a young Iranian actress, intended for her boyfriend living in exile. A lament of dashed hopes from the contested 2009 presidential elections, which were followed by the largest protests since the Islamic revolution. The filmmaker stages a parallel eight-year-old reality – the pre-election ecstasy is framed by an incomplete rehearsal of Macbeth. We relive situations that cannot be changed and that deeply resonate with the motif of coming to terms with reality. The actor’s hopeless gesture is balanced by a call for resisting totalitarianism and by an homage to the victims of the autocratic regime. The feverish atmosphere of the elections is muffled by the skepticism of the main protagonists – they, too, were once young and naive.

"Is there a void from which the sense emerges? Can we fill the emptiness by a reality, our own reality? The images that we remember, are they the same images, or reflections of those images?" A. Razi

biography

Ali Razi (1978), originally from Shiraz, Iran, is an award-winning filmmaker and theater director. Many of his original projects mix elements of documentary and fiction while exploring the relationship between the individual and power. His first film, Twenty Days That Shook Tehran (2010) has been screened at numerous festivals.