Notre Empire
Film in progress
Director : Pouria Hosseinpour
Duration : 90 min
Year of production : In development
Support : CNC, CNAP
My father was a supporter of the Shah, and his brother, Ali, a revolutionary — assassinated in Paris in 1982. My father always refused to speak about it. I decide to return to Iran in search of the truth.
Selected for the Francophonie Meetings at the Luxembourg Film Fund.
The film opens with the singing of Sonia, the director's sister, performing Bach's Quia Respexit, a voice that will carry through the entire work.
The narrative unfolds along three interwoven threads: the investigation into the death of Ali Reza Hosseinpour, the director's uncle killed by a parcel bomb in Paris on June 19, 1982; a portrait of his parents, Iranian exiles with opposing paths and wounds; and his own journey to Iran, in search of his roots.
The father, an unrepentant royalist haunted by the loss of his brother, builds himself an armor of muscles and grandiose, illusory schemes, 'The Persian Empire must return!' The mother, meanwhile, fled both her country and a destructive marriage, and is now trying to rebuild her life. Sister Sonia, a soloist and librettist, transforms these family stories into art.
Between Paris and Tabriz, the director films archives, interviews those close to him, and walks through vanished places. He patiently reconstructs the mystery surrounding Ali, revolutionary, dervish, and possibly the victim of a Franco-Iranian spy network. The camera draws out words, cracks open silences, and culminates in a moment of crisis in which the father, for the first time, fully reveals himself.
The film closes on a completed act of transmission: a son born, a grandson playing in Mamie Djoun's room in Tabriz, and the poem engraved on Ali's tomb, the very same one that opened the film, recited by the father in the garden.
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