Vlad PETRI
Korean Premiere
Romania in the late 1970s. Zahra and Maria form a close bond while studying medicine together at university in the capital Bucharest. But when Iranian Zahra senses a wind of change from her homeland, she quits university and returns to Tehran full of revolutionary aspirations. Separated by both the physical distance and uncertainty of two political regimes on the verge of collapse, the two friends must correspond and report on their daily lives via letters.
In this movie, the two women who exchange letters are fictional characters named Maria from Romania and Zahra from Iran. The content of their correspondence draws from Romanian secret police records, Romanian artist Nina Cassian, Iranian artist Forough Farrokhzad, and other references. The fictional letters that run through the list of references offer a new way of looking at two revolutions that occurred in different spaces with a time gap: the 1978 Iranian Revolution and the 1979 Romanian Revolution. The Iranian Revolution dismantled a dictatorship in the 1980s, while Romania fell under a dictatorship around the same time. In 1989, the leader of that dictatorship was publicly executed during the Romanian Revolution. The fictional letters do not let these events remain isolated within the histories of individual countries. While emphasizing the common desires of the people, they also reflect on another mistake or repetition that followed the revolutions. The key point is that the "two women" are the voices behind the expressions. The film highlights the Iranian Revolution as a gender revolution, critiques the Iran-Iraq war that followed the Iranian Revolution and reflects on the rapid transformation into a consumer society after the Romanian Revolution. This is achieved through an intimate conversation in the form of "letters," creating a space where the "two women" serve as subjects of discourse. This narrative revolves around excluded voices in history, creating a fictional method to establish emotional connections and triggering reflections on historical writing and cinematic experiences.
Vlad PETRI
Vlad Petri is a director interested in political and social subjects, often mixing personal images with official archives. His films, at the border between documentary and fiction, have been shown and won awards at international festivals. His selected filmography includes: Between Revolutions (2023), The Same Dream (2022), The deer passed in front of me (2020) and Where are you Bucharest? (2014).