Hollow

Inspired by two stories by Gregory Burnham and Edward Lowe, this poetic and experimental essay film is a new look at the ill-fated relationship and human book with life and numbers.

An Iranian expat journeys back to his homeland, where he must face his domineering father and grapple with complex emotions about family ties, cultural identity, and his place in the world.

A Bosnian woman is released from prison after 13 years. She comes back home, where she finds her young son and his pregnant girlfriend. With luggage and flight tickets in their hands, they are up to travel to start a new life.

In 1978, on the verge of Islamic revolution, more than 130 cinemas burned down across Iran, including 28 in Tehran. Who set them on the fire? How and why? If movies can predict revolutions, does any revolution see the revenge of people unseen on the silver screens?

Six Iranian directors examine, one after the other, a place in Iran, France, or Germany. The places and the stories enter into a dialogue with each other and deal with living conditions in today's Iran, social and economic struggles, but also identities in exile, and places of longing.

We see footage of the Green Movement, a wave of protests in Iran that began in the summer of 2009, in response to the presidential election fraud in favor of the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We see the chaos, the solidarity among the people, and the amazement too: that this is possible, that this is actually happening. Shaky handheld images capture both the energy of the crowd and the panic when shots suddenly ring out. Meanwhile, a voice-over calmly recounts what happened to the people we see.