The Iranian-Dutch visual artist and filmmaker studied visual arts at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and now lives and works in the Netherlands. Her work explores the concept of time by reflecting on the absence of images, memory psychology, oral history, narrative techniques and physical-psychological space. Her films have screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales, Art Brussels and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia. She is currently developing her first feature-length film.
What was your starting point for City of Poets?
Everything started with a Mulberry tree planted by my grandmother in the garden of her house. The tree was almost as old as me. It was a rare tree as it gave both red and white berries. Years after my grandmother’s death, the tree had become enormous, its roots damaging the neighboring houses. As the neighbors continued complaining, my uncle had no choice but to cut the tree. Yet no gardener had agreed to cut it as they considered a Mulberry tree sacred.
That tree presented me with domesticity, happiness, belonging, and a sense of wisdom. My grandmother had a strong connection to it, too; she always talked to it, sang to it, and danced in front of it. Once the tree was gone, it felt as if she had died again.
The absence of the tree brought me to my memories of my grandmother’s house and how it had become the first shelter for my family after becoming refugees of war. Then my mind moved to the alley where the house was located, and then I thought of the city, where all the streets were named after poets. As a four-year-old, I knew many poets’ names because we took refuge in that city.
It was a complex process of remembering. But once I began writing the voiceover, dynamically, the order of things changed. I wrote about a fictional city where all the streets were named after poets. And then with every change of society, the street names were replaced by new ones. In a way, these changes were gradually mapping the history of that city from the inside. From there, I moved to one specific alley, a specific house, ending with the Mulberry tree.
Do you have a favorite moment in the film? Which one and why this one?
This is hard to answer, as City of Poets is a chain of images, just like the daisy chain of memories I based the story on. Each frame gives birth to the next and motivates another image to appear.
But if I really have to choose a moment, then I would choose two instead of one; the first comes early in the film, the moment when the women arrive in the city, as a group of young girls march into the streets, and gradually start to dominate the schools, offices, sports fields, and factories.
The second moment comes later in the film when many traumatic events have already happened to the citizens of City of Poets. A little boy sleeps peacefully on a flowery carpet in the house, and in his dream, he sees trees growing in the empty streets of the city. Trees somehow always survive the destructions of humankind. Meanwhile, his parents sit as always in the same living room, on that same carpet, watching over him. But because of the awkward tension that has been built up throughout the film by then, it is as if the heart of things has changed. The safe feeling of home has disappeared even if the people are still there and do the same things. I think the essence of my film is strongly represented in a moment like this.
What do you like about the short form?
The first film I ever made was only 37 seconds. That confirmed for me how much could be said and shown in just such a short time. I was aware of that already, as photographs had always contained an infinity of stories to me, of other moments, the befores, and the afters. The short form means being to the point, precise, and searching for the essence of a story.
Having said that, City of Poet became the foundation for a feature film, which I am currently developing. The story inspired by the Mulberry tree planted by my grandmother blossomed into a much-expanded tale about different generations of women of one family. Again, it is a fictional film inspired by the events of the lives of women whose struggles and challenges I witnessed growing up.
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PRESS REVIEWS
„In both theme (world ravaged and transformed by war) and form (elegiac still images), it recalls Chris Marker’s La Jetée, concerned with the impossibility of returning to the past, yet still looking back with an intense and haunting nostalgia. The patient construction and fable-like narration create a powerful elegy to a world forever lost.“
review by Redmond Bacon for Directors Notes
„City of Poets by Sara Rajaei (Netherlands) is a much gentler – but no less powerful – account of a country beset by war and oppression, in which found footage speaks of lost happiness and a hope displaced.“
mention by Laurence Boyce at Cineuropa
„Fotoaufnahmen, in denen die Wolken vorüberziehen, sonst jedoch die Zeit stillsteht, sind nur eines von vielen geisterhaften und poetischen Fragmenten Sara Rajaeis filmischen Spaziergangs durch eine Stadt, in der alle Straßen nach Poeten benannt sind. Puzzleartig fließen die Geschichte einer Stadt und die umrissartiger Figuren ineinander wie Ort und Zeit in der Aneinanderreihung der Archivaufnahmen. Die Erinnerungen an vergessene Dichter mögen mit laufender Zeit den Straßennamen von Nationalhelden, Königen, Wissenschaftlern, Bergen weichen, die poetisch-assoziative Aufmachung aber nie einer konventionellen Erzählstruktur.“
mention at Riecks Film Kritiken
„The film “City of Poets” by Dutch-Iranian director Sara Rajaei deals with the history of a city and shows how changes gradually limit the freedom of its residents. „
mention by Doreen Kaltenecker for Testkammer„
„City of Poets (Sara Rajaei, 2024), about an unnamed city in Iran, is even better, utilising archival photography to build a psychogeographic memory of a long-forgotten place. „
mention by Fedor Tot for Journey into Cinema
„City of Poets“ is a series of photographs from Iran. It reveals a kind of family album from a fictional city that could have existed. A city whose streets are named after poets. After the outbreak of war, refugees arrived, new neighbourhoods were created, new street names were added, old streets were renamed after soldiers who died in the war. In the end, no street has the same name as before. I see sad women and learn from the narrator that singing was banned, then dancing, then people burned their own books to protect family members. In the film discussion, director Sara Rajaei talks about the origin of the photos, about a mulberry tree and about her family in Iran.
mention in german by Dominique Hensel for Weddingweiser
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By placing war as a central event, Sara Rajaei goes beyond the specific influence and role of governance and faces a more general concept of the ruling pillar of a society. And this becomes problematic when the government, instead of paying attention to life, of which poetry is one of its aspects, defines its existence with war. A war that, like any other war, has nothing but destruction and death. No matter how constructive and generative life and poetry are, war is destructive and deadly. And when the poets‘ names are replaced by the names of the dead on the streets of the city, the geography of the narrator/filmmaker becomes narrower and narrower“
review in Farsi by Hadi Ali Panah for Fidan Film
„Although we see no violence, no corpses (only one soldier features in the film), and the narrator does not elaborate on these subjects, the horror of war and dictatorship is effectively transmitted through the expressions on the protagonists’ faces and the progressive loss of their freedoms. The omission of specific details regarding the country, the timeframe or the political figures lends a universal character to the story. This is all the more powerful considering that the whole region of the Middle East has been embroiled in conflict for the past three decades. It will doubtless resonate with anyone who has been affected by war as well as those who wish for an end to all wars.“
Review by Isabel Roy and Verena Nees for World Socialist Web Site
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ETC.
„Rajaei’s choice to forefront women in her film was influenced by the recent seismic events in Iran, she points out. “When conflicts happen, who is the first to be eliminated or to be forgotten about? So there was this connection between the women and the poets. But also our editing period was actually carried out in parallel with the protests in Iran. So that, of course, oriented us to focus more on women.”„
background infos at SEE NL and Business Doc Europe
„City of Poets starts by telling the story of a fictional, possibly Persian, city and then becomes a portrait of the first-person narrator’s mother.“
interview with section head Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck for Berlinale Topics
reactions on letterboxd
Berlinale Shorts 