cinematography
Vytautas Katkus
editing
Boris Hadžija
sound
Luka Barajević
production designer
Michael Schindlmeier
costumes
Anna-Maria Scharf

cast
Hoda Taheri
Boris Hadzija
Branka Hadžija
Jahandokht Taheri
Hadi Khanjanpour

production
DFFB
co-productions
Cruising
Naked
Mala
producers
Maximilian Feldkamp
Hoda Taheri
Boris Hadžija
Čarna Vučinić
Ena Bajraktarević
co-producer
Tyler Hills

international press office
Noise
Kai Hermann
kai@noisefilmpr.com

Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, is pregnant and in love with Boris, a queer gay man from Serbia. Together, they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a future built on their own terms. As they prepare for the wedding and enter more deeply into each other’s worlds, their relationship is seriously tested by all the red tape and their families’ expectations and histories that neither of them can leave behind. Surrounded by relatives, memories and inherited ideas of love and parenthood, Hoda and Boris begin to question the roles they are about to take on. What starts as a plan to become a family gradually turns into a more intimate and uncertain question: can they reinvent what it means to be a couple without losing what brought them together?

2026 I Plant My Hand in the Garden
2024 Mother Is a Natural Sinner (short)
2023 As If Mother Cried That Night (short)
2023 Yugotransport – We Are All on the Same Bus (short)
2022 Mother Prays All Day Long (short)

“The film is fiction, shaped by autobiographical experiences. In our work, fiction is never something the characters surrender to. On the contrary, it is something that we try to dismantle. Even the possibility of a future, like the imagined life of a child, is treated as material fiction, something that can be touched, rejected, or silenced. Casting members of our real families is part of this fictional construction: their existing relationships, gestures and personal histories bring a particular tension to the performances, while allowing us to communicate with them indirectly, through invented characters and situations. The film is interested in the unstable boundary between what appears real and what is constructed. A passport is a physical object, yet the identity it grants is political and imagined. Marriage may be legally recognized while remaining difficult to define. A queer man is measured against expectations of masculinity and fatherhood; a refugee becomes German on paper; belief, nationality, gender and family are constantly shaped by institutions, traditions and personal desires.” (Boris Hadžija & Hoda Taheri)

Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija are Berlin-based filmmakers from Iran and Serbia/Montenegro, whose work explores migration, identity, queerness and alternative forms of family through genre-crossing storytelling. They met while studying directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) and have since developed a shared cinematic practice. Together, they created the short film trilogy Mother Prays All Day Long (2022), As If Mother Cried That Night (2023), and Mother Is a Natural Sinner (2024), which premiered at Locarno. Yugotransport – We Are All on the Same Bus (2023) premiered at IFFR. I Plant My Hand in the Garden is their first feature film.