22/03/2024 - Iranian director Atiye Zare Arandi trains her camera on her nine-year-old niece, who wants to choose her own custodian after her parents’ messy divorce

Melina is nine years old, but to say she’s much wiser than her age would suggest is an understatement. The protagonist of Grand Me [+see also:
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film profile] is a child dealing with the fallout of her parents’ divorce – a role you never choose for yourself, but one which is bestowed upon you – and she has no other option but to react. It’s a knotty situation: Melina has been living with her grandparents in Esfahan, Iran, since the separation, with both her father and mother married anew. Unwanted by her stepfather and kept away by her father, who holds on to her passport, the girl considers filing a custody case herself. In this way, Grand Me becomes a candid portrait of child discontent and independence, shot and directed by Melina’s aunt, Atiye Zare Arandi. The film had its world premiere in the NEXT:WAVE section of this year’s CPH:DOX.

For her international feature debut, Atiye Zare Arandi keeps it close to home, without ever actively interfering. The verité style of filmmaking relies on observation, but also being part of certain familial situations in such a pure way is only possible for someone as intimately involved as a relative. Observing becomes participating, but in an uncompromising, respectful way, capturing the ease with which Melina expresses herself, or refuses to do so. Tensions brew and bubble, but never because of the camera. As a direct portrait of ineffable dynamics, Grand Me doesn’t need to underscore any of the context that is specific to Iran – such as gender roles or child custody law – and vests all its power in its child protagonist.

Melina is fierce and outspoken: she confronts her mother in ways that many European audiences would find surprising. Another film could have perhaps used that charge to sway the viewer into over-empathising with the daughter or demonising the parents (remember Capernaum [+see also:
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One tool to facilitate this tricky representation is, unsurprisingly, the camera. On the one hand, we have Arandi’s camera, but on the other, Melina films herself with a smartphone, to an empowering result. With an absent mother and a distant father, the girl could have poured her heart out to the camera or lashed out in front of it, but instead, she uses it to channel frustration into a quasi-performance that actually reveals more about her emotional state than, for example, the make-up tutorials she records. Without any intervention or voiceover, the director encourages her niece, only by filming and retreating, in a generous act of parental – and directorial – care, to pursue conversations, to address the harshness of her own situation, and to seek her own place in a world that is so complex and messy.

Grand Me was produced by Associate Directors (Belgium) and ATAM Film (Iran), and CAT&Docs handles its world sales.