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

Overview

Set between Tabriz and Tehran in the weeks between the Twelve-Day War and the subsequent conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States, this film follows two Iranian artists whose lives have become inseparable from a vast private archive assembled over decades: photographs, documents, discarded objects, and traces of anonymous lives. Working somewhere between collecting, hoarding, preservation, and obsession, they have created an improvised museum of neglected lives, one in which sex workers, young soldiers, child labourers, gay lovers, and ordinary families emerge through abandoned albums, damaged belongings, and fragments of memory left behind by history.