Higher than Acidic Clouds

After the of premiere of his film Terrestrial Verses (co-directed by Alireza Khatami) in Cannes, Ali Asgari was banned from traveling by the Iranian authorities. But filmmakers like Asgari are not easily deterred from practicing their art, despite unceasing repressive government interference.

At the beginning of Higher Than Acidic Clouds, we see mysterious men intrude upon the quiet of the filmmaker’s home in Teheran, interrogating him and searching his apartment. They take away hard drives full of material after Asgari has filmed an acidic smog cloud hanging above the polluted city. He is left with his memories, the only thing that cannot be confiscated.

In stubborn resistance to his growing pessimism about the way his city is developing, Asgari shows his dreams and reflections in countless apocalyptic shades of gray. He muses about his mother’s native language, about his sisters who could never see his films in the cinema, and about Rome, where he lived for ten years. But above all, the filmmaker longs to go outside and fly above the city at a height from which all people are equal.