Higher than Acidic Clouds
(Iran/Luxembourg, 70 min.)
Dir. Ali Asgari
Programme: World Showcase (North American premiere)
In 2023, Ali Asgari travelled to Cannes to premiere the film Terrestrial Views that he co-wrote and co-directed with Iranian0Canadian filmmaker Alireza Khatami. When Asgari returned to his home city of Tehran, he was soon interrogated by the local authorities. His passport was taken away, the hard drives containing some of his footage were confiscated, and he was summarily banned from travelling or producing any more films.
Following the lifting of this injunction, Asgari crafted Higher than Acidic Clouds, an introspective look at his period of house arrest. It’s a claustrophobic rumination upon the nature of artistic expression and both the lure and lurid nature of his nation’s capital city. Shot using a sombre black and white palate, the filmmaker employs crude yet painterly visual effects, creating the vision of a bubbling, broiling sky to evoke the smog that lingers atop Tehran’s concrete expanse, the distant hills faded from sight.
Within his apartment are the trappings of a life on the globalized festival circuit: there’s a poster for Terrestrial Views, of course, but also ones for other Cannes favourites like Lee Chang-dong’s ruminative Burning, and Grand Prix winning One Upon a Time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Yet for the most part, the apartment is as generic as any of the myriad flats throughout the city. There’s little sense of overt beauty in the space, coming across at times as something between a hotel room and a cell, making these small trappings that speak to Asgari’s more cosmopolitan connections feel even more distant.
Using voiceover, Asgari talks elliptically about his ostensive house arrest, speaking of members of Iran’s notorious morality police coming by and interrogating him for the crime of having thoughts felt impure to the politico/religious establishment of the state. While there’s an undercurrent of repulsion at such actions, Asgari continues to be extremely careful not to make direct challenges to the institutions that have harmed him. The metaphorical and ominous clouds instead speak to the sense of being smothered by those who wish to silence him.
Asgari speaks of his confiscated footage, showing how, while the physical discs have been taken away, his “inner hard drive” continues to store ideas and memories. He speaks about his dream of flying, and how his city holds a similar draw despite all of its challenges. We see a vision of his mother, her hand set to shield her son from acid rain, and we are told of the sun’s annoyance at the choking clouds.
Sombre images of amusement parks fade into tales of Asgari sleepwalking as a young boy, wanting even during rest to explore outside the confines of his home. While we hear how since his childhood Tehran has become grey, there’s hope, for as Asgari intones, “Beyond these acidic clouds, stars still shine.”
There are more philosophical connections, including overt allusions to Albert Camus, who wrote in his notebooks of clouds that “thicken over the cloister” and that bear “the moral virtues attributed to the dead.” This sense of doom and dread, along with a systemic erasure of a past before the current regime, forces Asgari to describe Tehran as an “Alzheimer’s affected city” where the loss of memory is made pathological and (seemingly) irreversible.
Yet there are moments of hope baked in, even if fleeting. We catch a glimpse of Iceland’s glacial landscape, and Asgari asks longingly if he is a “director in Iran or a bird in Iceland.” At the same time, his elderly father is seen as stubborn in a refusal to head to the north of Iran, only in his last few months to befriend a feline that helped give him a sense of happiness that allowed him to break through his rigid ways. Celebrating a cat as catalyst for cathartic travel is a moment of warmth in an otherwise austere and suffocatingly heavy tale.
One’s appreciation of Asgari’s documentary will be directly attributable to one’s patience for its mode of telling, as well as for how closely one feels to anxiety and state-originated stultification. Asgari’s act of filmmaking itself is a form of resistance, of course, frustrating those that wish to silence him and bringing to the word’s attention the artist’s ideas and passions no matter the obstacles standing in the way. The goal of clambering above the suffocation is a noble one, and while this attempt to fly higher than the titular acidic clouds may not be to everyone’s taste, its fundamental rejection of censorship is to be applauded.
