Shâd Bâsh

Bâbâdjoun, my dear dad, what’s Iran like now? What if I went there? History has redistributed the cards of our personal history, creating knots and gaps. Going to Iran is an impulse towards you that my life has missed so much. But am I able of going to the country you fled ? In the memory of my heart, the lines of a Persian poem you taught me : “Nothing stays, everything passes, everything changes, so live in joy”. Bâbâdjoun, will we be able to make up for lost time before we disappear ?

Hélène Rastegar is a fiction and documentary filmmaker. After studying cinema, she coorganized the Chacun Son Court short-film festival, then took part in the Lussas writing residency. She directed the short fiction films Nocturnes (produced by GREC) and Hydrangeas in winter, and the feature-length documentaries Dreams in progress and Shâd Bâsh. Her films are imbued with a dual Iranian culture in perpetual construction, and feature female characters whose bodies bear the marks of an internal struggle to survive and make a place for themselves.