Hoda and Boris are in love and are expecting a child. So, they decide to marry and officially form a family together. But as the wedding draws nearer, it starts to dawn on them that becoming a family may require them to reinvent what it means to be a couple.
After all, Hoda is an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, and Boris is a queer man from Serbia. They are the protagonists of I Plant My Hand in the Garden from co-writers and co-directors who share – no coincidence, you’ll see! – their first names: Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija. The film, marking the debut feature-length movie for the duo, will get its world premiere in the competition of Venice Days, or Giornate degli Autori, the independent section within the Venice Film Festival promoted by the Italian filmmaker associations Anac and 100autori.
“Together, they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a future built on their own terms,” reads a synopsis for I Plant My Hand in the Garden. “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?”
