Endless Borders

Original title: Marzhaye bi payan
Genre: Drama
Director: Abbas Amini
Country: Germany, Iran, Czechia
Year of production: 2023
Czas: 111 min

Awards and nominations:
2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam: Big Screen Award for Best Film
2023 International Film Festival of India: Golden Peacock for Best Actor – Pourya Rahimi Sam
2023 Tirana International Film Festival: Best Feature Film

Ahmad is a teacher sent to a distant village close to the border with Afghanistan. Soon after we meet him, his wife is freed from jail in Tehran. Niloofar spent a year behind bars, most probably having been sentenced for the same political motivations that brought banishment upon Ahmad. Their past remains shrouded in mystery, though. Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Amini portrays his characters in an enigmatic way and doses suspense, thus telling a fascinating, layered, and equivocal story. Secretive and taciturn Ahmad is depicted through his present actions: he works at school and helps local community. One day he meets a family of refugees who fled from Afghanistan after the Taliban came to power and becomes involved with their lives. The limbo Ahmad and other characters find themselves in is beautifully depicted by Saman Lotfian’s cinematography. His poetic shots make the desert landscape of the frontier claustrophobic and stuffy. But most of all, it’s merciless, just as constantly emerging, impossible-to-cross borders.

Author: Magdalena Bartczak

Director:
Abbas Amini – a filmmaker who’s becoming one of the most interesting voices in the contemporary Iranian cinema. He started his career as a documentalist depicting the drama of the Iran-Iraq war, among many other subjects. He also directed a few feature films, like „Koshtargah”, a 2015 horror awarded at the Busan festival, and „Hendi i Hormoz”, a drama awarded by the NETPAC jury at the Fajr International Film Festival.

   subtitles in Polish and English