I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies
Mara Ashaegh Chenan Bayad Ke Har Bari ke Barkhizad Ghiamat-haaye por Atash Ze Har Su-i Barangizad
Mani Haghighi
Iran
- 2026
Set between Tabriz and Tehran in the weeks between the Twelve-Day War and the subsequent conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States, this film follows two Iranian artists whose lives have become inseparable from a vast private archive assembled over decades: photographs, documents, discarded objects, and traces of anonymous lives. Working somewhere between collecting, hoarding, preservation, and obsession, they have created an improvised museum of neglected lives, one in which sex workers, young soldiers, child labourers, gay lovers, and ordinary families emerge through abandoned albums, damaged belongings, and fragments of memory left behind by history.
Mani Haghighi
The grandson of the prestigious filmmaker Eberahim Golestan, he was born in 1969 in Tehran (Iran). He received a B.A. in Philosophy from McGill University, 1991, an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph, 1997, and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Trent University, 2000, before he returned to Iran to begin making films. His feature debut, ‘Abadan’ (2004), premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, while ‘Men at Work’ (2006) competed in Berlin and Valladolid, and won awards in Hong Kong and Fajr. After filming ‘Canaan’ (2008), he directed two documentaries about the Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui, and with his fourth feature film, ‘Modest Reception’ (2012), he won the Netpac Award in Berlin. After ‘A Dragon Arrives!’ (2016) and ‘Pig’ (2018), selected for competitions such as Berlin, Bafici, and Seattle, in 2002 he premiered ‘Subtraction’, his eighth feature film, at the Toronto Film Festival. He has also worked as an actor in around twenty films, including ‘About Elly’ (Asghar Farhadi, 2009).
