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Original name: Balatar az Abrhaye Asidi
English name: Higher Than Acidic Clouds
Year: 2024
Run time: 70 minutes
Language: Farsi
Type (Colour/Black & White): Black & White
Country: Iran, Luxembourg
Director: Ali Asgari
Producer: Ali Asgari, Milad Khosravi
Cast: Ali Asgari (narrator)
Screenplay: Ali Asgari, Ali Shamsbr
Cinematographer: Arman Fayaz
Editor: Ehsan Vaseghi
Sound Designer: Abdolreza Heydari
Music Composer: Navid Divan
Production Company: Taat Films, Seven Springs Pictures
World Sales: Milad Khosravi
Ali Asgari is a prominent figure in Iranian cinema with more than 200 awards to his name. Two of his short films, More Than Two Hours (2013) and The Silence (2016), were nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Festival de Cannes. Ali’s films focus on the precarious lives of individuals living on the margins of society in his native country, Iran. His debut feature film, Disappearance, had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. After dedicating his time to creating several other short films, he directed Until Tomorrow, his second feature film, which premiered at Berlinale 2022. Ali’s third feature film, Terrestrial Verses, a cross-genre film, premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
After the premiere of his film Terrestrial Verses (co-directed by Alireza Khatami) in Cannes, Ali Asgari was banned from traveling. However, filmmakers like Asgari are not easily deterred from practicing their art, despite relentless repressive interference. In stubborn resistance to his growing pessimism about the way his city is developing, Asgari expresses his dreams and reflections in countless apocalyptic shades of gray. He muses about his mother’s native language, his sisters who could never see his films in the cinema, and Rome, where he lived for ten years. But above all, the filmmaker longs to go outside and fly above the city at a height from which all people are equal. He is left with his memories and imagination, the only things that cannot be confiscated.
