This film describes the cre­ation of a work of art in all its amaz­ing indi­vid­ual steps. We are in the west­ern moun­tains of Iran, the land of the Bakhtiaris. Wool is the common thread that runs through nomadic and seden­tary cul­tures, con­nect­ing the worlds of weavers, dyers and shep­herds. The car­pets form the social fabric of their lives, giving it shape and color. From the pome­gran­ate fruit, whose seeds are painstak­ing­ly removed from the husk by hand and dried, comes one of the nat­ur­al dyes. And then the heavy moun­tains of wool sink into steam­ing vats of dye, and the dyer does not reveal the secrets of his sweaty craft. Those who have had little enthu­si­asm for car­pets may dis­cov­er their beauty here - and the respect for a sus­tain­able pas­toral cul­ture from which they originate.

Best Cana­di­an short or medium-length film, Mon­tréal Int. Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val (RIDM) 2018

Ariane Lor­rain is a doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er of Iran­ian and Cana­di­an ori­gins based in Mon­tre­al, where she obtained a BFA from the Mel Hop­pen­heim School of Cinema. Her short film BETWEEN THE GARDEN AND THE SEA (2016) screened at fes­ti­vals inter­na­tion­al­ly. In 2018 she par­tic­i­pat­ed as one of 7 direc­tors in the omnibus con­cert-film THE SEVEN LAST WORDS. She also works as a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy and found­ed the dark­room coop­er­a­tive „Le Trou noir“ in Mon­tre­al in 2014, which gath­ers analog-lovers around work­shops and a shared studio space.

Shahab Mihan­doust was born in Tehran short­ly after the 1979 rev­o­lu­tion. He left the coun­try in the early 2000s for Mon­tre­al as a stu­dent of Com­put­er Sci­ence. After his Master of Sci­ence he began film stud­ies at the Mel Hop­pen­heim School of Cinema. His mid-length doc­u­men­tary MISLEADING INNOCENCE (2014, script: Francesco Garut­ti) ana­lyzes the fact that extra low bridges on the park­way to Long Island had been designed to secure access to the beach­es only for cars and their well-to-do owners. In his works, he employs both fic­tion­al and doc­u­men­tary forms to express human con­di­tions and to study how social and cul­tur­al behav­iours relate to the envi­ron­ment and landscape.

Direc­tor, Edit­ing, Pro­duc­tion: Ariane Lor­rain, Shahab Mihandoust;
Cin­e­matog­ra­phy: Ariane Lorrain
Sound: Shahab Mihandoust
Com­pos­er: Far­shad Poorhos­sei­ni, Hojat Poolani
Sound­de­sign: Benoît Dame
Dis­tri­b­u­tion: Les Films du 3 Mars, Mon­tréal, Clotilde Vatrinet distribution@f3m.ca