The trailer (below) has debuted for “An Owl, a Garden and the Writer,” which is having its world premiere as part of the Burning Lights Competition of Visions du Réel, the documentary film festival, which runs April 21-30 in Nyon, Switzerland.
Sara Dolatabadi’s film previously won the Works in Progress Post-Production Development Award at Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2021, and was presented at the IDFA Forum that same year.
The film is produced by Dolatabadi and Farhad Mohammadi for Dolatabadi’s production outfit Petit Duc Doc, in association with Fondation Jan Michalski. The film is executive produced by Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi (“Vegas,” “Manhattan by Numbers,” “The Runner”), who received the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker award at the Venice Film Festival in 2016, an award dedicated to a personality who has made an original contribution to innovation in contemporary cinema.
In 2016, Dolatabadi began documenting her visits to her family’s garden outside of Tehran. Here, she spends her days with her father Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, one of the most prolific contemporary Iranian novelists. He is a man who has lived through poverty, imprisonment, revolution, war, political repression and censorship. As they share memories, Dolatabadi counters her father’s version of events by narrating her own perspective as a child.
Having been inspired throughout her life by Dowlatabadi’s ability to create a completely fictional universe within their daily lives, Dolatabadi incorporates her daughter’s imaginary adventures along with narration of passages of Dowlatabadi’s writings, blurring the line between fiction and reality.
“From when I was little, I was aware that Mahmoud is a great writer, and famous. This didn’t impact our relationship as daughter and father as such, but it did force me to see him through the admiring eyes of others,” Dolatabadi said. “As a result, he became two different people for me: Mahmoud the beloved father and Mahmoud the great writer whom I don’t have the same access to. This idea of wanting to know more about his other reality, or his imaginary life, has been with me for a long time. Getting into someone’s imagination is impossible, but imagining his creative universe was a joyful process. This film is my personal quest to get to know him better, an attempt to get closer to his imaginary world.”
Naderi added: “Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is one of the most prominent Iranian authors today. On a par with authors like Tolstoy and Faulkner, Dowlatabadi has succeeded to narrate the heart and soul of his country in his work. A strong, pure voice in the Persian language, he has documented the history of his people in his novels and stories. Thus, especially with regard to the current state of the world and Iran, a documentation of his life and work is of utmost importance.”
Dolatabadi, who is a multimedia visual artist, is making her feature film debut with “An Owl, a Garden and the Writer.” After university, she spent the next decade living and exhibiting in Tokyo, Paris and New York. While in New York, she obtained her MFA from Hunter College and, for her thesis, she directed and produced the short documentary “Summer Light” about her family. She currently lives in Libreville, Gabon.