A collaboration between Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari and British sculptor Douglas White is a poetic meditation on sculpture, cinema, family, childhood, and body: its destruction and rehabilitation.
A beautiful young woman undresses herself before the camera. She has had a mastectomy: with her short hair and undressed, she looks like a teenage boy. This is Mania Akbari, the author of the film. She has several operations ahead of her, but beating cancer is not the central theme of picture. Based on years of correspondence between Akbari and White (he writes in English and she in Farsi), the film unfolds as a very personal conversation touching on rubber, its production and use in sculpture; our skin and the connection between sculpture and anti-hijab protests in Iran; White’s father’s funeral; and Akbari’s childhood memories of the Iran-Iraq war.
Exploring a number of important and delicate issues (both for Iran and humanity in general), A Moon for My Father remains first and foremost a poetic essay. Neither personal nor collective trauma prevent the authors from seeing and admiring the beauty of any human body.
A Moon for My Father
Directors: Mania Akbari, Douglas White
UK, Iran, Germany, 2019. 85 min. 18+