VENICE 2026 Giornate degli Autori
Review: I Plant My Hand in the Garden
- VENICE 2026: Straddling autobiography and fiction, Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija’s debut feature film probes family, identity and belonging, challenging the roles society assigns us
On the second day of the Venice Film Festival, Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija’s feature film debut, I Plant My Hand in the Garden, is competing in the 23rd Giornate degli Autori line-up, questioning the distinction between reality and fiction from its opening scenes. Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, is pregnant by Boris, a queer Serbo-Montenegrin man. The two decide to get married and raise the baby together, but what should be the start of a new family soon turns into a clash with family expectations, bureaucracy and identities that are hard to leave behind.
The film opens with a video call between Serbia and Iran: Hoda tells her mother and sister about the imminent wedding and the pregnancy, immediately introducing the emotional geography of the story, which is composed of countries, languages and families separated by borders that technology can only partially bridge. From then on, the film proceeds in fragments, through scenes mostly shot using a static camera. The protagonists’ families meet, talk at the table, share secrets; the two mothers-in-law communicate via Google Translate, in a situation that produces both comedy and a sense of estrangement. Without warning, a chat about the mother’s make-up can easily give way to accounts of the dead in the streets of Iran.
This juxtaposition of the everyday and the uncanny is one of the most interesting traits of Taheri and Hadžija’s mise-en-scène. The pair play themselves and involve their own families in the film, transforming autobiographical material into something continually elusive. Temporal jumps, dreamlike transitions from one scene to the next, the dreams recounted by the characters and the breaking of the fourth wall all interrupt the narrative’s linearity. A sequence with a gynaecologist culminates in a close-up reminiscent of Courbet’s L'Origine du monde. Hoda subsequently returns the wedding dress, claiming she didn’t even wear it, and scenes follow in which any certainties amassed to that point are once again called into question.
In this sense, fiction doesn’t serve to reconstruct the authors’ experience, but to subject it to a process of transformation. It’s not always possible to tell what belongs to lived experience and what’s been constructed for the film, and this ambiguity becomes the movie’s main narrative tool. The baby on the way also takes on a dual dimension: it’s a concrete presence, but it’s also the image of a future which is yet to be decided, onto which desires and fears linked to parenthood are projected.
From here, the film broadens its discourse to the question of identity. Being a mother or father, a refugee or a citizen, a husband or a wife doesn’t only mean occupying a position defined by law or society but facing the roles others have already imagined for us. LGBTQ+ identity thus intersects with migration, citizenship, nationality and family, as Hoda and Boris look for a form of belonging which doesn’t necessarily correlate with the options available.
Not everything is quite as effective: the film’s fragmentary structure and some of its more radical twists and turns can sometimes feel programmatic rather than necessary, especially when disorientation effects become predictable. But it’s through this constant oscillation that the film manages to turn a private story into a broader reflection on the ways we build our relationships.
In this sense, I Plant My Hand in the Garden speaks to the theme running through this year’s Giornate degli Autori line-up: characters who cross geographical, social and emotional borders while the films themselves blur the lines between documentary and fiction, memory and invention. Hoda and Boris aren’t just trying to build a family, they’re trying to work out whether it’s possible to do so without automatically inheriting the rules that define it.
I Plant My Hand in the Garden was produced by DFFB (Germany), Cruising (Germany), Naked (Serbia) and Mala (United States). The film’s international sales agent is Square Eyes (Austria).
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 03/09/2026: Venice 2026 - I Plant My Hand in the Garden
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© 2026 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege
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