Iranian director Mohsen Gharaei, who is at the Venice Film Festival with well-received drama “Falling House,” is set to shoot a new film titled “Centrifugal Force” that will capture “the impossible choices facing a generation of Iranians today,” as the synopsis puts it.
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“Falling House,” which world-premiered on Wed. in Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar, follows a modest family on the outskirts of Tehran who faces the imminent destruction of their home as part of a vast redevelopment project. Rashid, the patriarchal father and a prison guard, attempts to contain family rebellion while being accused of corruption.
“Centrifugal Force,” which will be shot in an undisclosed location outside Iran in Farsi and English with still unspecified Iranian and international actors, will be “a deeply human story about what happens when the home you love is no longer a place you can return to,” Gharaei said in his directors’ statement.
“After finishing my latest film, I found myself on an unexpected journey from one geography to another,” Gharaei, who is now living as an exile outside Iran, added. “But migration is not simply a matter of moving from one place to another; it is a moment when a person is suddenly pushed out of the center of their own life. The journey becomes most painful when departure is not a choice, when all familiar paths close, one by one, and suddenly you have to leave a home that you still love.”
“Centrifugal Force” will be the story of a family that has remained in Iran for years, not entirely out of contentment, but out of the hope that somehow it might still be possible to build a life with all its contradictions. They have held onto staying and created a sense of order for themselves within a system they believed to be stable. But in a geography like Iran, where the line between simply surviving and truly living can shift without notice, no sense of order is ever completely safe,” Gharaei went on to note.
“With forced migration, the family enters a world governed by a different set of rules, where things no longer work as they used to. What appears from the outside to be a form of escape can, from within, feel like a kind of collapse. Distance from home makes the distance between family members visible. It reopens old wounds. Crisis challenges the image they have of one another. It is as if migration does not only change their physical location; it also displaces their understanding of home, family, and even self,” he continued.
“This is where centrifugal force takes shape, drawing people away from a point to which they have been deeply attached, without necessarily knowing what lies ahead. Within this deracination, the family is as weightless as hay, easily pulled away from the center. And the further they move from it, the more they are confronted with the question of what truly connected them in the first place: geography, memory, habit, or something else for which they have no name.”
Just like “Falling House,” “Centrifugal Force” is being produced by exiled Iranian producer Milad Khosrav, who now runs his Seven Springs Pictures company out of Istanbul in tandem with
Oscar-winning producer Odessa Rae (“Navalny,” “The Voice of Hind Rajab”). They are shopping the project at the Venice market, knowns as Venice Production Bridge.
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