"There is always hope"

When the "Women, Life, Freedom" revolution began in Iran in 2022 after the arrest of Jina Mahsa Amini and her death in custody, I had already been in prison for months. I wondered how people who work in the system of oppression think, what kind of personality they have. And how it is that they think so differently from me.

At one point, state employees were with us in prison. One of them broke away from the group, came up to me and said: "I hate what I'm doing. Every day when I go to prison for my job, I wonder when I'm going to hang myself from which post." He also said that his family and children asked him critical questions every day and condemned him for what he was doing. For me, that was the inspiration for the film about a man who is no longer able to separate his work for a totalitarian state from his love and care for his family.

The film is about obedience and people who work in an ideological environment, like the father, who loses his own moral values as a result. In the course of the film, he becomes a symbol of patriarchy. The family then becomes a metaphor for the relationship between civil society, the resistance and the regime.

Yes, that is typical of Iranian mothers, who have to ensure that the balance in the family is maintained. The most important thing for them is to keep the family together. In the film character, this has less to do with her and her own ideas and more to do with the expectations of society. At the same time, she has hardly any relationship with the outside world. She gets all her information from the television news, which is controlled by the regime. She is virtually imprisoned in her flat. At least in the beginning, she lets the official reports and thus the regime have power over her thoughts. This is very common in Iran.

Seven years ago, I discovered this fig tree on an island in the south of Iran. I was fascinated by its life cycle. The fruit is eaten by birds and the seeds are carried on in their droppings. The seed then seeks out another tree as a host, wraps itself around it and eventually strangles, i.e. kills, it.

For me, it is a metaphor that is very open and therefore also allows for many interpretations, for example that the system also prepares the ground for resistance, just as the tree becomes a breeding ground for the fig. But I don't want to say too much about that, perhaps just that no matter when in life, you can find hope at some point. And that out of something bad or not so beautiful, like faeces, something beautiful and good can emerge again in the end, like the fig tree.