Still: City of Poets - Sara Rajaei

In an unnamed city, two decades before the war, all the streets are named after poets. A visitor to the city isn’t directed to a road, rather to a great writer of verse. But when the war begins, the refugees arrive and the city expands, which means that there are too many roads to name and too few poets. So the names of heroes, kings and scientists are applied, and then the names of trees and flowers. And as war continues to rage, the city council turns to the names of fallen soldiers, eventually renaming every road. Which means that the poets become but a distant memory.

In a road which had been named after a great 12th Century poet, a woman plants a mulberry tree that becomes inhabited by a spirit that can only be kept at bay when she dances before it. But then, in the City of Poets*, dancing is banned. And then singing is banned, and then all music is banned. Silence. 

As the allegorical tale is narrated, we are presented a series of still images, culled from three archives, including that of director Sara Rajaei’s own family. Much of the time, we see the women, standing in pairs or in group shots and at various stages of their lives. When the music stops so do the images of the people, and by the end of the film nobody is to be found on the city streets.

“The idea for City of Poets started with a mulberry tree, planted by my grandmother in the garden of her house,” explains director Rajaei in her notes for the film. “The tree was almost as old as me. It was a rare tree as it gave both red and white berries. 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.”

“I wrote the film with this fairy-tale tone on purpose,” the director further explains to SEE NL.

“But at the same time the film is addressing something real. Something of our contemporary history and things that I experienced during my childhood and that I still experience. So yes, it is a fairy-tale, but it is about something much larger, much more universal.”

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.”

The director tells SEE NL how City of Poets is the “mother” of her upcoming feature Headless Trees*, “the story of a family living in this same metaphorical town.” The feature tells the story of four generations of women who exist between two distinct historical points 50 years apart.

In her notes, Rajaei further distils the essence of her film world-premiering in Berlin. “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. I have constructed the structural transition of the city through fragmentary memories that are told by the voice-over, addressing the most essential aspect of oral history: as something that is not fixed and made up of different sources and voices, without specific hierarchy, repeated and changed ever so slightly.”

City of Poets is produced by near/by film.

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival takes place on February 15 - February 25. Find the complete Dutch line-up and schedules here. Or discover Berlinale on https://www.berlinale.de/en/home.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund