Iran

The film Hashti Tehran portrays the peripheral spaces between urbanity and suburbia just outside the city of Tehran. Daniel Kötter opens up four different spaces of transition on the outskirts and shows parts of the Iran that rarely get to be seen. The slow paced pans of the camera across the buildings and landscapes are accentuated by conversations between real estate agents and clients, or people living in the area who talk about expulsion and migration. Hashti Tehran tells the story of how social spaces are not created due to their centricity, but through the use and occupation by people. (Berlinale Forum Expanded)

TEHRAN-GELES flies us over a would-be space, where past and present, memory and imagination merge under luminous Iranian adverts and signs projected over an aerial night-time image of Los Angeles. “During the flight, phone call recordings relate memories of events that took place in Tehran. These stories refer us to the city’s past. In the 1970s and 80s the reality of American life was projected onto Tehran’s social and urban fabric. The revolution brought this period to an end. Like science fiction cinema, in which the present of a city is projected into the future, this video projects the past of Tehran into the present, taking Los Angeles as a setting.” (Le Fresnoy)