In his film Iran, director Ali Asgari still sees “A Little Light”

When Iranian doctor Arash, together with his assistant, began removing the bullets one by one from the bodies of the demonstrators shot by the police, he could no longer see the light: “They were 16, 17 years old; we gave them all the morphine we had to calm them down, but there were only screams and moans. One of them had been shot in the windpipe; they were regarded as criminals and we couldn’t treat them”, he tells his sister Masia after informing her of his decision to take his own life. It is in the desperate gaze of those young people – a gaze Arash did not have the courage to meet even for a moment that evening – that he sees “a reason that drives him to give up on life”: in this country, you wake up in the morning and don’t know if you’ll make it to the evening; it is a pain you carry inside you from the moment you open your eyes, and you cannot even explain it, but it is there, tattooed upon you.

Ali Asgari, director of the film “Un po’ di luce” – Kami Nour in Persian – in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, arrived in Rome on Tuesday, where he studied for ten years, to present a preview of his latest film at the Greenwich cinema – a film “about life continuing amidst tragedy”, he says. “For a year we were surrounded by numerous tragedies, but I always saw this life, running on a parallel track and continuing, undisturbed. I didn’t want to make a film about the war, about the massacre of young Iranians, but about its effects. Nor did I want to make a dark film: as the title suggests, I wanted to portray a little light that still exists at the end of Iran’s tunnel – the light we are seeking, in the everyday reality of life that carries on.” Ali tells Il Foglio that he came up with the idea for the film in June last year, during the Twelve-Day War, and was struck by how life carried on, against the backdrop of the bombing, followed by the subsequent protests that were brutally suppressed: “I wanted to portray this contrast – war and life continuing side by side, the fragile boundary between despair and the silent forces that keep us anchored to life.” Life lies in the small, everyday gestures, in family ties that waver but do not break, in the plants that take over the rooms and survive as they are passed from house to house, in the clandestine performances without hijabs. Arash has decided to take his own life, but life continues to pursue him; the green leaves of his plants are so large they won’t even fit in his car; he keeps giving them away, and yet he remains unemptied.

“He is haunted by small signs of life and light that never leave him alone,” says the director: flowers, trees, animals: “In the film, I tell the story of a person who wants to die, but it is life itself that keeps seeking him out.” War, on the other hand, is present in Trump’s threats of bombing – “it could strike at any moment”, as is repeated on several occasions – in the tape on the windows used for protection, in the regime’s calls from an unknown number that never stops monitoring you, in the blocked internet, in the seals on a doctor’s surgery who had the audacity to ‘want to save the world’ by treating the ‘rebels’, and in the fear of taking one’s son to hospital for fear that he might be arrested. ‘War gives you strange ideas, you know?’ a friend remarks. ‘Demolishing it costs more than rebuilding it, and if a missile were to hit it, I’d save myself the cost of demolition – after all, Trump has said his strikes will be targeted and won’t hit civilians. Trump would never lie; he’s sure of that.’ While trying to explain to his three brothers the darkness into which he has sunk, Arash always sees a glimmer of light. The ultimate challenge is the moment when he’ll have to tell his mother about his decision, but first Masia takes him to her son’s show; they have to hand in their mobiles because it’s all clandestine. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ comments his youngest sister Mahsa, ‘it’s not as if we were robbing someone.’ On stage, the young man has to say goodbye to his mother before fleeing abroad; she begs him not to leave, then calls out to the audience from the stage: “Can you persuade my son to change his mind?” One member of the audience replies: let him go; there’s nothing he can do here. Arash says nothing. Even at the final family dinner with his mother, everyone will be far too quiet; then the sound of laughter will return, along with hot dishes, music and a Kurdish dance in which bodies draw closer and hands clasp and intertwine, bringing a little light back into the room.