Continuing the noble tradition of Iranian rebel directors who displease their government, Ali Asgari has reacted to an official ban on him making further films by making another film. Clothed in luminous monochrome, Higher Than Acidic Clouds is an elegant response to state censorship, an autobiographical docu-drama hybrid with an emphatically personal flavour. But is is also a quietly courageous hymn to the power of imagination over philistine, bullying, culture-crushing regimes everywhere.
Asgari’s previous feature Terrestrial Verses (2023), co-directed by Alireza Khatami, was a portfolio of tragicomic vignettes satirising the Kakfaesque bureaucracy of contemporary Iranian society. Launched in Cannes, it won warm reviews and multiple festival prizes, but inevitably rattled the authorities in Tehran. Since returning to Iran, the director has been banned from both travelling and film-making.
Following in the footsteps of fellow embattled Iranian maestros like Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi, Asgari not only defies these restrictions but critiques them directly in Higher Than Acidic Clouds. A melancholy collection of memories and impressions, this intimate essay-film feels slender and disjointed in places, almost like a sketchbook of loosely connected observations. But it is also achingly beautiful, emotionally powerful and unavoidably charged with timely political import. It world premieres at IDFA this week with further festival screenings to follow in Tallinn Black Nights, Torino, Marrakesh, Goa and more.
Asgari plays a version of his real self in Higher Than Acidic Clouds, and also provides the lyrical, free-ranging narration. He dramatises his current restrictions in stylised terms, showing prison bars being fitted over the front door of his high-rise Tehran apartment, and repeated interrogations by security agents. But while they may confiscate his computers and books, he muses, they can not take his internal hard drives of memory, fantasy and creative imagination. And despite this confined one-room setting, there are ravishing cutaway shots here of snowy Iceland, a distant land where Asgari felt strangely at home, and Rome, where he lived for a decade. Referencing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), he notes sadly how the Italian capital openly celebrates its rich cinematic history, in sharp contrast to Tehran.
The suffocating sickness of Tehran is a recurring motif in Higher Than Acidic Clouds. Choked with traffic fumes, the Iranian capital routinely ranks among the Top 20 cities for air pollution worldwide, a scientific fact that Asgari turns into a potent metaphor for a deeper malaise engulfing his homeland. In a superbly rendered piece of visual effects, he fills the skies above the city with a sinister blanket of cloud, rippling and pulsing and faintly biomorphic, like something from a sci-fi horror thriller. Though he does not draw explicit parallels between this poisonous entity and the toxic Iranian regime, casual references to agents “holding another girl’s hair hostage” clearly protest the government’s ongoing policy of arresting, jailing and even murdering young women like Mahsa Amini merely for breaking conservative dress codes.
Asgari dedicates Higher Than Acidic Clouds to his mother, who appears on screen in dreamlike scenes and flashbacks, including an exquisitely staged vignette of the director’s younger self sleeping on the back seat of a car. There are echoes here of Fellini’s autobiographical 8 1/2 (1963), presumably intentional, given the Fellini homages in the Rome section. The director’s four sisters also have cameo roles, gathering to share a private home screening of his debut feature Disappearance (2017), a film that would never be allowed to screen in a Tehran cinema. Bringing a welcome note of comic relief, the women offer mixed impressions, negative and positive. One gives the film five stars, on a par with James Cameron’s Titanic (1997).
Regardless of political subtext, Higher Than Acidic Clouds is more poem than polemic. In his doleful voice-over, Asgari mourns the lost Tehran of his youth, with its colourful parks and playgrounds, all now erased by an “Alzheimer’s afflicted city” crowded with drab concrete skyscrapers and monotonous grey streets. Meanwhile, he dreams of becoming a bird and soaring high over the metropolis, a fantasy that inspires some gorgeous high-resolution aerial shots: deserted fairgrounds, empty chairlifts, highways stretching towards the horizon, the mountainous skyline beyond.
Credit is due to cinematographer Arman Fayaz for clothing such a slender, impressionistic work in consistently sublime visuals. His luminous high-altitude vistas lend Tehran some of the same celestial radiance that Wim Wenders conferred on Berlin in Wings of Desire (1987). Composer Navid Divan and sound designer Abdolreza Heydari are also key players here, giving Asgari’s film a haunted, brooding audio dimension to match its finely crafted visual beauty.
Director: Ali Asgari
Screenwriters: Ali Asgari, Ali Shams
Cinematography:Arman Fayaz
Editing: Ehsan Vaseghi
Music: Navid Divan
Sound design: Abdolreza Heydari
Producers: Milad Khosravi, Ali Asgari
Production companies: Seven Springs Pictures (Iran), Taat Films (Iran)
Venue: IDFA (Envision Competition)
In Farsi
71 minutes
