Vienna-based sales agency Square Eyes has acquired international rights to “I Plant My Hand in the Garden,” directed by Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija, ahead of its world premiere in Venice’s independent Giornate degli Autori section, also known as Venice Days.
The film is the debut feature for the directing duo, who previously worked on the short film trilogy “Mother Prays All Day Long” (2022), “As If Mother Cried That Night” (2023), and “Mother Is a Natural Sinner” (2024), which all premiered at Locarno Film Festival. In addition, “Yugotransport – We Are All on the Same Bus” (2023) premiered in Rotterdam at IFFR.
The film centers on Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, who is pregnant and in love with Boris, a queer gay man from Serbia. Together, they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a future built on their own terms. As they prepare for the wedding and enter more deeply into each other’s worlds, their relationship is unsettled by bureaucracy, family expectations and histories neither of them can leave behind.
Surrounded by relatives, memories and inherited ideas of love and parenthood, Hoda and Boris begin to question the roles they are about to take on. What starts as a plan to become a family gradually opens into a more intimate and uncertain question: Can they reinvent what it means to be a couple without losing what brought them together?
