Over the course of a week BOOMERANG is unfolding as a sociological snapshot of modern Tehran with manhood in crisis, a crumbling marriage and a teenage couple falling in love under the eyes of the public.

Venice Film Festival 2024 - Giornate Degli Autori

SCREENINGS IN VENICE
Saturday 31 Aug at 5:15pm* - Sala Perla (Public - World Premiere)
*Please note that the schedule indicates 4:30pm as 2 short films will be shown before
Saturday 7 Sept at 10pm - Sala Volpi (Public)

Cercamon PR - In Venice starting Aug 29

Dorian Magagnin <dorian@cercamon.biz>

Director & Writer Shahab Fotouhi Cast Arash Naimian, Leili Rashidi, Ali Hanafian, Yas Farkhondeh, Shaghayegh Djodat Director of Photography Faraz Fesharaki Editing Pouya Parsamagham, Alexandre Koberidze Costume Design Shokoufeh Rahmati Set Design Siavash Yasdanmehr Sound Design Tobias Adam Mix Kai Tebbel Grading Isabelle Julien Music Panagiotis Mina Producers Luise Hauschild, Mariam Shatberashvili Co-Producers Majid Barzegar, Shahab Fotouhi Production Company New Matter Films (Germany) Coproduction Companies Zohal Films, Rainy Pictures Countries Germany, Iran Language Farsi Genre Drama  Run time 83 min Info DCP I Color I 1:1,66 I Dolby 5.1

Shahab Fotouhi (b. 1980, Yazd, Iran) is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Tehran. Between 2008 and 2010 he studied fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His exhibitions and video works have been shown worldwide in various prestigious institutions, including New Voices at the Barbican Centre, London, 7th Taipei Biennale and 11th Istanbul Biennale, Apeirophobia/Aporia at Human Resources, Los Angeles. His work Post Institutional Stress Disorder was shown at Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus.

From 2010 to 2015, Fotouhi was co-founder and co-organiser of the artist initiative and collective Kaf in Tehran. In 2014 he was part of the artist residency programme at the Queens Museum of Art in New York, and in 2015 he participated in the summer academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Boomerang is his first feature film.

Like my close friends and me, the grown-ups in Boomerang — Behzad, Sima, Sadaf — all grew up after the 1979 Revolution. We were politicized as college students and later took part in the 2009 Green Movement — defeated, we abandoned the project of political change. But a new generation ruptured the bleak reality of our lives and threw us into a “here and now”. We are witnessing this new ‘species’— the generation of Minoo, Keyvan, and their friends — as they leap towards liberating their bodies, and romantic lives.

Minoo and Keyvan make first eye contact at a traffic light. They bond quickly and effortlessly over their most intimate fears and longings. We follow them immersed in the crowds, roaming the metropole. Their sense of freedom and commonality is not only due to their age but also because they confront walls differently. While my generation spent years negotiating those walls and settling for even a crevice before finally, tired and hopeless, surrendering to stasis, they just jumped those walls and made the city their own.

I’m interested in storytelling where the action is at times immobilized or replaced by a diversion or comment on the story itself. Instead of a “and then and then and then” form I’m interested in disintegration and refraction. That’s why Boomerang’s structure is fragmented and some fragments are a form of reverberations of the previous fragments with changing points of view. Sometimes a previous scene reappears via a conversation, like when Behzad tells Sima that he met with his ex Sadaf and he quotes Sadaf word by word.

For me Behzad, the male leading role of the film, does not actually lead the narrative in any of the sequences; he tries to initiate but never has the upper hand and he cannot possibly win. He seems trapped in the status quo that the others have already left behind: Sima, his partner, has decided to divorce him before the film starts. His attempts to rekindle with Sadaf also fails; and Minoo his daughter, rejects his efforts at mending their relationship.

Throughout every one of his encounters, he performs his stuckedness. I would say, Behzad actually plays a supporting role in his own life. Nonetheless, Behzad is not a total loser; Sima compliments his quince jam, Sadaf sings along to his song and Minoo sends kisses although from afar; they do not leave him utterly defeated. The very acknowledgment of Behzad’s supporting role might be his most decisive feature. It’s the only thing he can come up with to try and prevent his utter redundancy.

Through the character of Behzad, I try to talk about the straight middle-aged, middle-class men in Iran who have lost initiative and at best are sympathetic onlookers of women’s active and progressive presence. As Behzad finds himself in a form of negative space, so does the film want to actively engage the audience in a reality pieced together and without a clear cause-and-effect structure, focusing more on the details, the tones, and gestures of failed and emerging relationships.

Coming soon….

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