Granted the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award at the Göteborg Film Festival – which will allow him to stay at the Bergman Estate on Fårö – Farshad Hashemi plays with fact and fiction in his debut film, Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others [+lee también:
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entrevista: Farshad Hashemi
ficha de la película], which sees a woman opening up her home to a film crew. Predictably, things will get broken. But perhaps some will be fixed as well.

Cineuropa: The film is dedicated to your parents. How personal is this story, exactly?
Farshad Hashemi: I owe this whole journey – the one that I have embarked on in my artistic career so far – to my parents and their support. Pursuing art as a primary profession and insisting on continuing it, especially in a country like Iran, where art is undervalued and lacks its rightful place, is a very challenging endeavour. Dedicating the film to them was the least I could do. What you see in the film happened to me in real life, when I was involved in making a short in Mahboubeh’s house [Mahboubeh Gholami, who acts in Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others]. Now, she is our protagonist, and the house this film crew rents out is still her actual house.

Family is one of the most important themes here, but so is loneliness. Why did you want to talk about someone who just keeps on experiencing loss?
Human relationships and their complexities, as well as loneliness, as you said, are what many people are always grappling with. The world experienced a new form of loneliness during the pandemic, but I have been concerned about it as well. If there is one thing, one word that really inspired me to make this film, it’s “change”. Because a change occurs to our main character in the midst of these human relationships.

Why was it so interesting for you to show the whole backstage of the filmmaking process? At one point, it’s difficult to say what is real and what’s not.
There are many paradoxes in the film. We mention birth and death, happiness and sorrow, love and separation, disorder and order, loneliness and togetherness. This confrontation between reality and falsehood is another one of them.

We tried to address concepts of reality and falsehood in many different ways, also thinking about censorship – the kind of censorship we have been facing in Iranian cinema for years now. Choosing the structure of “a film within a film” allowed us to show how different it is to make a film with censorship and without it. We focused our efforts on making sure everything seemed real, on trying to paint a true picture of life. Interestingly, sometimes our real behind-the-scenes blended in with the behind-the-scenes events we see in the film – they became indistinguishable for us, too. On the third day of shooting, our main camera stopped working, and we just added it to our script. There were more examples like this.

In the past, you have worked with Ali Abbasi on Holy Spider [+lee también:
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entrevista: Ali Abbasi
entrevista: Ali Abbasi
entrevista: Zar Amir Ebrahimi
ficha de la película] – was that important to you, especially as it was so controversial at home? Also, what does it mean to win an award named after Bergman himself?
It’s actually the first one, and I am so glad it’s adorned with his name. It’s a great honour and something that’s very valuable to me. Now, when I continue on this journey, I will also take it as a big responsibility on my shoulders.

Every experience I have had so far, both in cinema and in theatre, I have tried to treat as my university and a chance for learning. Collaborating with Ali and the whole Holy Spider team is certainly among them. He is a very intelligent, talented director. I don’t know what kind of cinema I would like to make next, and this film happened at a time when I never expected to be able to make a feature at all. I can’t predict the future, and I am aware I will still have to experience a lot, but I know this is just the beginning.