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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?
In a statement, Taheri and Hadžija said, “With ‘I Plant My Hand in the Garden,’ we continue a body of work in which our lives, families and earlier films remain in dialogue. Characters return from one film to the next, carrying unresolved questions into new situations.
“The film is fiction, shaped by autobiographical experience. Thematically, we are interested in the unstable boundary between what appears real and what is constructed.
“For Hoda, as a refugee, a passport is a physical object, yet the identity it grants is political and imagined. Boris, as a queer man, is measured against expectations of masculinity and fatherhood. Their marriage may be legally recognized, but it remains difficult to define. We are not interested in defining relationships, but in asking whether something new can grow outside the forms we have inherited.
“Although the title may suggest otherwise, ‘planting a hand’ is not about claiming a place, but about discovering whether something unfamiliar can take root.”
Wouter Jansen, CEO of Square Eyes, said, ‘‘ ‘I Plant My Hand in the Garden’ is not only a humorous and thought-provoking film with innovative storytelling, but also clearly positions Hoda and Boris as filmmakers to keep on your radar.”
“I Plant My Hand in the Garden” is produced by Maximilian Feldkamp for DFFB (Germany), with co-production by Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija for Cruising (Germany), Čarna Vučinić and Ena Bajraktarević for Naked (Serbia) and Tyler Hill for Mala Productions LLC (U.S.).
