I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies

From Viennale

In Tabriz, Iran, artists and collectors Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi gather photographs, documents, objects and fragments of anonymous lives. Their dusty, sprawling collection has both the tenacity of an archive—the refusal to let disappear what others deem unworthy of preservation—and the unruly impulse of hoarding. Pressed by the filmmaker to distinguish collecting from compulsive accumulation, they eventually admit that both may stem from the same syndrome: a fear of emptiness. In turning their collection into the film’s own anarchic repository, Mani Haghighi embraces the same fragmentary, eclectic impulse: he accumulates images and lets stories about the forgotten lives of sex workers and street children proliferate. But his film is very much haunted by erasure too. After revealing that its opening sequence is not the one originally intended, he discloses that the material we are seeing comes from an incomplete backup of footage confiscated by the censors. The archive thus emerges as a form of opposition: at once psychic and political, a way of pushing back against obliteration and assembling a memory from fragments, anonymous lives and traces defying the logic of the state. (Antoine Thirion)