22/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Faraz Fesharaki’s directorial debut builds a bridge between Iran and Germany out of webcam recordings and shared memories

With over ten years of documenting distance through a webcam and a desktop, one would expect Berlin-based Iranian filmmaker Faraz Fesharaki to be an expert in bridging gaps. But when it comes to home and, more importantly, the home you leave behind, no wizardry will ever heal that initial crack – even cinema. What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? [+see also:
interview: Faraz Fesharaki
film profile], Fesharaki’s feature debut, which has screened in the Berlinale’s Forum section, attempts to salvage what remains of a rift by searching for something that’s left unshattered: love.

Fesharaki’s webcam records it all, as pixelated images, poor bandwidth and frozen screens sit alongside better-quality footage and camcorder archives. But the stories they tell have so little to do with surfaces that the variety of textures and images weave a tapestry of personal worlds with the hope that their visible seams will act as a binding agent when words fail to do so. The desktops form a space-time continuum between the cities of Isfahan and Berlin, with his parents Hasan (Hasan Fesharaki) and Mitra (Mitra Kia) on the other end. Sometimes, he calls in with his cousin Rahi (Rahi Sinaki), who is first in Austria but, over the course of the film, moves back to Iran with no regrets. Multiple perspectives coexist, and the dialogue is ongoing: this is reason enough for Fesharaki to want to share his personal disposition with the world, and we’re glad he’s done so.

There are also those gaps that draw attention to themselves: solid frames of red that host intertitles, quotes, a poem or a letter, making space for written words when so much goes unsaid. In these brief pauses between people seen in their respective rooms, there is an attempt to grasp and ground the meaning of what escapes us. These are existential questions – what makes life worth living, where can one belong, what is happiness, and how to deal with a violent past, present and future – which are also uncompromisingly political. So, one resorts to material vessels to contain the ineffable grief of it all: Hasan’s “Kiarostami-style” sunglasses, the song Mitra refuses to sing, and the images of the Zayandeh river, dry for decades but now flowing again.

Known as the cinematographer for Alexandre Koberidze’s Berlinale FIPRESCI Prize winner What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexandre Koberidze
film profile], Fesharaki has waited a long time to make What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?, owing to the film’s nature as a personal timeline/archive. With all of its tenderness and patience legible from the silences allowed to haunt the pixelated video calls, this debut will surely seep into your daily life and conversations; when you call your parents, you’ll surely think of Hasan and Mitra. Such rawness must not be taken lightly, but rather treated with respect and the utmost attention, so that we learn to appreciate even those few seconds when the internet connection breaks down as truly shared, be they wordy or wordless.

What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? was produced by Germany’s DFFB in co-production with New Matter Films, with Berlin’s Oyster Films handling its world sales.