Iranian Director Ali Asgari on Travel Ban Doc ‘Higher Than Acidic Clouds’ and Rejecting ‘Victimization’: ‘Why Don’t You Just Let Me Make Films?’

After premiering “Terrestrial Verses” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, Iranian director Ali Asgari returned home to Tehran to find out he was banned from traveling for eight months, as well as having his personal belongings confiscated by the government authorities for weeks. The result of that period of uncertainty and introspection is the documentary “Higher Than Acidic Clouds,” having its world premiere as part of the Envision Competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

The autobiographical essay — shot in Tehran in nine days — zooms in on Asgari as he grapples with long-buried memories reignited by an enforced period of disconnection from the world, reflecting on his time living in Italy and embarking on frank conversations with his family.

It is important to mention that, in recent years, several Iranian filmmakers have been forbidden by the country’s strict government from leaving the country to attend festival premieres of their films. Recent examples include Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeh, who couldn’t travel to their Berlinale premiere of “My Favourite Cake” and the actors from Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes competition entry “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Rasoulof himself had to flee Iran to make it to the French festival.

“I had to ask a neighbor to use their telephone and call my mother,” Asgari tells Variety of arriving back to Iran from Cannes. “I expected my things to be returned quickly so I didn’t buy a phone and was home for an entire month without any connection with the outside world. It was then that I started thinking about my life, my childhood, my family and my connection to my city.”

Asgari says that his film is about “empowering [his] imagination,” reiterating he rejects victimhood. “It is not about victimizing myself in this country but seeing myself as a person with an imagination that can go beyond borders. I wrote about all these beautiful glimpses of my life and asked myself: Am I a victim in this situation? No.”

Despite “Higher Than Acidic Clouds” being Asgari’s first feature-length documentary, the director says he is interested in how cinema allows for the blurring of fact and fiction. The film, shot in luscious monochrome, feels somewhat suspended in reality, with the titular clouds lingering outside the windows of the director’s fictional home. To create the look of the clouds, Asgari worked extensively with a VFX team.

“I like to play with the medium,” Asgari says. “When I make a fiction film, I am interested in giving it a realistic approach, and when I make a documentary, I am interested in giving it a fictional life. Playing with cinema is a wonderful experiment and I was also coming a little from the Iranian school of filmmaking because we have a history of filmmakers, like Jafar Panahi, who toy with notions of fiction and documentary.”

“The definition of documentary is changing,” he adds. “I always questioned if a film can be a documentary if we have five people on set, if we are thinking about cameras, editing… This is all a manipulation of reality but it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

Speaking about the hardships faced by Iranian filmmakers, Asgari wants to highlight how difficult it is to get funding in the country, saying that the problem is that “Iran is in a location where we are considered nothing.”

“We are not considered Asian enough for Asian funds and not eligible for Middle Eastern funds because we are not an Arab country,” he elucidates. “We are not European, Mediterranean, Balkan… We are just Iranians and there is no funding for Iranians. We normally try to find private investors or put our own money in the film, knowing how difficult it is to get that money back.”

Asgari’s frustration is echoed by producer Milad Khosravi of Seven Springs Pictures, who says that the competitiveness of funds and grants in Europe leads their national cinema “towards a direction that the only possible way is to reduce quality.”

“Iranian cinema comes from years of excellence, but it’s not easy to maintain this level. There is no money for production but also no support for distribution in Iran because of our governmental and political issues,” he adds. “For someone like Ali, who has directed 14 shorts, four features and has been invited to some of the biggest festivals in the world, it is unbelievable to think he still struggles to finance his films.”

On making films during the current political situation in Iran, Khosravi says, “Things have been hard for Iranian artists for 1,500 years. Writers, poets, painters, and now filmmakers. Today, the most important thing is for us to learn how to work under this pressure.”

“Ali and I have not left the country like many other filmmakers have because we don’t want all the lights to go off,” continues the producer. “There are a lot of beautiful films and successful films made outside of the country but we don’t believe they are Iranian films. Iranian cinema means seeing Iranian streets, Iranian people and hearing the Iranian accent.”

The producer concludes by saying that, despite filmmakers being “courageous” and trying to “push the boundaries,” there is a felt need to respect the generation that came before them, like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhadi. “We don’t want to ruin their legacy and have to victimize ourselves to get funding to finance our films.”

On the common expectation in the industry that Middle Eastern filmmakers act as activists when presenting their films, Asgari says that he is often asked “particularly by Westerners” to “openly denounce the Iranian government, play the activist role, and hold placards everywhere I go.”

“Sometimes it’s a little irritating, to be honest, because I go to festivals hoping to discuss my films and the whole discussion becomes a TV program about the political situation in Iran and the Middle East,” he says in an exhale. “It is not that I am not interested in talking about it, of course I am, but I just don’t know what to say sometimes. Why don’t you just let me make my films?”