Pensée Sauvage Films

Ramin flees from persecution in Iran and ends up living in the limbo of exile, far from everything he knows, in the tropical port town of Veracruz, Mexico. There his nostalgia and melancholy are confronted with new friendships, while he starts to rediscover his own desires.

A Zapotec man from the future tells the story of how in the 21st century a new invasion of “foreigners” was afflicting his village. While people in Europe were suffering a crisis that made them lose memory and a sense of their culture, a group of youth in his village in Oaxaca was trying to document their own culture by making a film during Carnival rituals. While the youth are pushed to invite a director from the city to come help them, ultimately changing their project to be a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s THE SILENCE, a Swedish woman comes exploring in search of magical lizards that could be the next remedy for memory crisis back home. Characters mix and stories blend into each other in this absurdist and melancholic lo-fi/sci-fi story narrated as oral history with multiple voices.

Exiled from Iran after the ban on her 2009 film about the Green Movement, a filmmaker breaks her family’s decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in political prisons.