Article by Alessandro Pomati

Translation by Laura Cattani

In Tehran a search is taking place inside a big house: men are rifling through drawers and closets, boxes of personal belongings are being taken away. Nothing we have not already seen in the context of the Iranian dictatorship. But there is one jarring detail: the owner of the searched house is sitting petrified on the couch, while his place would be elsewhere, in a director’s chair, for example, directing that short, chilling sequence shot capturing the search. That is Ali Asgari, impatiently waiting for the authorities to do their work in his apartment-atelier and leave him alone, at least for the time being.

An unusual beginning is that of Higher than Acidic Clouds, which also fits into that long tradition of self-fiction we have become accustomed to thanks to the great masters of Iranian cinema (Kiarostami, Panahi). The filmmaker here is both a character of the story and an object to film. However, Asgari adds a new detail, which further upsets the cards on the table, making it difficult to draw a clear line between reality and fiction, between staging and documentary. Through a clever use of voice over, the director indeed creates the impression that the camera’s gaze is his gaze, and that he is somehow looking at himself “from the outside.” A need, the latter, matured during his eight months of forced confinement in his own home, following his return from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. That was a period of deprivation from any human contact spent reminiscing and imagining while waiting to be free again.

It is a suspended time, rendered in a black and white which is at times bright (surrounding childhood memory flashbacks, related in particular to her mother, who plays herself in the film), at times muffled and oppressive, when the film returns to interrogate contemporary Iran. Asgari captures this landscape in a mournful metropolitan symphony of Tehran, overhung, in the director’s vision, by an oppressive cloak of acidic, pitch-black clouds (a not too veiled reference to the dictatorship that rules the country, as well as to air pollution). Within this space related to reflection, however, there is also room for dreams, such as hovering in the air, higher than the black cloak of clouds- an effect achieved through the use of drone footage – and looking back at one’s city with the eyes of a child.

Asgari therefore achieves a fantasy, a sort of 8½ constrained in the domestic space, which demonstrates the ability of cinema to overcome all barriers, both those imposed by dictatorships and those imposed by its language, revealing a creativity and lucidity of purpose that have few equals in recent cinema.