A captivating film that immerses you in a world of pages, delicate drawings, tiny hands, and boundless imagination.
Waad Al-Kateab, Academy® Award Nominee and BAFTA Winning Director of FOR SAMA
Another Eastern culture was the only way to reunite myself with my own Eastern culture.” |
One person who I'm most grateful to is Shohreh Golparian who connected me with the Iranians I met in Japan and facilitated the process of making the film while I was initially studying at Waseda University. She was Kiarostami's translator and assistant while he was making Like Someone in Love, his last narrative feature, in Japan. She's also the liaison and contact for many great Iranian directors who come to Japan like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Amir Naderi. She introduced me to the retrospective that galvanized me to make the film. Those films are "The Runner," "Where is The Friend's House?," "Willow and Wind," and "The Mirror." I decided then to make a film about my time living and studying and working in Japan, as well as focusing on the Iranian diaspora in Japan. There was a really amazing experience of reconnecting with my own culture and diaspora through being in Japan. To see all these Japanese filmmakers appreciate the work of Iranian filmmakers made me feel really proud of my own heritage as a first-generation Iranian American with a mom from Mashhad. I originally wanted to study and make a film in Japan purely based off of my love for Japanese cinema that really fostered when I was 16 and went to a Barnes and Noble in New York and devoured the entirety of the Japanese film assortment in the Criterion Collection. From then on, I just knew I wanted to direct a film in Japan and learn the language and it was pretty easy to fall in love with Japan after living there and traveling there and inundating myself with the food, the nature, the customs, and the people. More specifically, the elderly population of Japan made me feel warm and welcome. On numerous occasions, there would be elderly individuals who would see me, sketching and drawing usually, and offer me hot beverages in the winter, and cool ones in the summer. It felt almost complimentary to Iranian culture in many ways. I felt like another Eastern culture was the only way to reunite myself with my own Eastern culture.
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