What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?

The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood.

Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity.

“The camera doesn’t lie,” Abbas Kiarostami used to say in his workshop. “One can trust the camera.” That’s why I recorded those moments. Now, after finishing the film, I am no longer sure I can truly “trust the camera”. Every day in the editing room, I could create a different family. At times, my father was the kindest person a child could wish for; at others, the devil on earth. Sometimes I was the most humorous son, entertaining my parents endlessly; at other moments I was absent. And my mother? She remained constant — loving, deeply empathetic, intelligent and, above all, fierce. How could a camera that does not lie allow me to leave the editing room every day with a new version of our family? That remains a mystery to me.

I never intended to make a faithful documentary about the Fesharaki family. What interested me most were the small narratives that emerge when people love each other. Perhaps through this film, viewers may glimpse a family and understand how the beloved revolution of my parents’ generation was stolen from them, and how the brutal oppression that followed ruined not only their lives but also those of their children. Yet there is one thing that keeps us all together: hope.’