Docunight #32 [Calgary]: Relationships

Relationships
Directed by Farnaz Jamshidi Moghadam
2015 / 53 Mins
Persian with English subtitles

“Relationship” is a documentary about short-term relationships among young adults in Tehran, where emotional relationships don’t seem to work very well, and people don’t seem to be satisfied with their relationships anymore. This film doesn’t look at this topic as a “problem”, neither it tries to find a “solution” for this matter. It just creates a comfortable and honest space for both genders to talk this topic face to face.

One of the characters in the film explains the situation as this: “We don’t know ourselves, so we don’t know what we want, therefore we don’t know what we want from our partner either”. And another one explains the problem as “They want me not to have any emotion in these modern relationships, and they humiliate Love as a feminine object, which is terribly incomprehensible for me.”

Farnaz Jamshidi Moghadam was born in 1977, graduated from Soureh University in cinema B.A 2001. She made her first short film in 1999 called “A Season without You”. She has made several films since then, including “Fresh Air” and “ Fingerprint” in 2002, “That’s My Share” in 2005, and “My Daughter Maryam” in 2007, “Narration Of A Sorrow” in 2009. She has worked as script supervisor and assistant director in several feature films with Pouran Derakhshandeh, Rakhshan Banietemad, Masoud Kimiaie, and others. Her latest documentary “Relation” was made in 2015.

Farnaz is mostly interested in social documentaries and is mostly focused on women’s life in Iran and their challenges.