Berlin-based sales agency Films Boutique has acquired worldwide rights to Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi’s documentary “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies,” which is set to premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Set between Tabriz and Tehran in the weeks between the 12-Day War and the subsequent U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, the documentary accompanies two artists whose lives have become inseparable from a vast private archive assembled over decades: photographs, documents, discarded objects, and traces of anonymous lives.
Working somewhere between collecting, hoarding, preservation and obsession, Nasser Bakhshi, a painter, conceptual artist, collector and curator, and his partner Roghayeh Najdi have created an improvised museum of neglected lives, one in which sex workers, young soldiers, child labourers and ordinary families emerge through abandoned albums, damaged belongings and fragments of memory left behind by history.
“Their sprawling collection of found art objects has helped preserve Iran’s contemporary history as an artistic and political act,” reads the logline. Films Boutique describes “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” as Haghighi’s “most formally inventive and culturally urgent documentary feature to date.”
