A Man Passes by the Soaked Trees (2020)

38 minutes / horror-queer-docufiction

After killing a man in the forest, three girls recall the memories they’ve had with the opposite sex through the man's dead body.

"A Man Passes by The Soaked Trees" is a social experiment through hybrid cinematic language which puts three Iranian teenagers in a forest to reflect on their experiences when they are finally given the chance to take revenge towards a man.

shot in summer 2020 in tehranpars, when whispers of the woman life freedom revolution were being heard between the youth.

made together with my closest friends right before I left Iran for good. we improvised the whole film out of nothing, without permission and we were actually arrested twice while shooting the film.

the film has gone through a strange journey, has died many times and reborn again as completely different films. In the past four years, I have made many different versions of the film, each one feel like a totally different film; the first cut being 95 minutes (shown in @festival_entrevues_belfort 2021 films en cours), then becoming 65, 55, 45 and the last cut was made in 2024, finally being 38 minutes long. I am not sure which version was the best one but I have ended up now with this one. mitra who had called the first version of the film "a pure gem", hates the last version of it and believes that "this film has become the victim of its time". and the filmsaaz who shot the film, would have definitely hated the final version of it as well because all the essential scenes of the film have been removed from it. so if the very first version of the film was released as it was, perhaps that would have been the best. I may also have to release the first version someday publicly.

I decided to publish the film online.
so may it live on this way and reach its audience.

thanks to Mostafa Soleymani, Anita Bagheri, Sayna Sadeghi, Anita Yousefi, Farzad Shahab, Shayan Ebrahimi, Niayesh Hatam and Arghavan Heydareslam. I miss u all, a lot xxx