Shahid

*The screening of this film was made possible with the support of the Goethe-Institut, Chișinău Branch.

Director Narges Shahid Kalhor no longer wants to be called “Shahid” (martyr) and casts an actress as herself, who is supposed to set about changing the family name. All of a sudden, her bizarre great-grandfather appears. A man who was declared a martyr in Iran after his heroic death a hundred years ago and thus bequeathed to his descendants the honorific “Shahid”. He seeks to prevent his great-granddaughter from going through with her plan. The temporal layers blend into each other and the film shifts between reality, fiction, theatre and musical, questioning all kinds of radical ideologies — while not taking itself all tooseriously either. Shahid is a personal film about the balancing act between coming to terms with the past, with the present, and with one’s own self.