Filmmaker Statement

Our film takes place in a society where violence is normalised and intimacy is absent. Though the rules of this world may appear surreal, they were in fact inspired by our own world. Natalie's family, who fled Communist Romania, experienced first-hand the absurdisms of a surveillance society. But this film was equally influenced by more recent events, including the 2023 sentencing of a young Iranian couple to ten years in prison for the crime of dancing before Tehran's "Freedom Tower". It was in this confluence of the ridiculous and the horrific that we wanted to explore how society's conventions distort human relationships. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to work with Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who alongside a sensitivity to the political undercurrents of the film, shares with us a love for imaginative cinema. Together with Luàna Bajrami, we set out to explore how these rules distort the lives of three very different women: Angine, a bourgeoise who begins by passively accepting