Higher Than Acidic Clouds

Balatar az abrhaye asidi

Ali Asgari
Iran, Luxembourg | 2024 | 70 min
Swiss Premiere
Language : Persian
Subtitles : English, French

On house arrest in his Tehran apartment, a defiant filmmaker is forced to confront his life’s work through a surreal journey of the imagination – all while apocalyptic clouds loom over the city, threatening to snuff out his creative rebellion. A masterful work on the infinite potential within, by one of Iranian cinema’s most prominent contemporary figures.

Ali Asgari is a leading voice of Iranian cinema. In 2023, following the premiere of Chroniques de Téhéran (co-directed with Alireza Khatami) at the Cannes Film Festival, his passport was confiscated upon his return to Iran, and he was officially banned from making films. Yet the creative freedom of Iranian filmmakers proves difficult to suppress. Reimagining his confinement under house arrest, Asgari turns to what the regime has not yet managed to seize: his imagination. Perched in his apartment overlooking Tehran, he tries to recall a city that no longer exists, now cloaked in a dense, ominous haze. In infinite shades of grey, he summons dreams and creative impulses: revisiting his mother’s language, screening his banned films for his sisters, and imagining the star-filled skies of his childhood beyond the toxic clouds overhead. Higher Than Acidic Clouds is both a powerful act of resistance and a bold cinematic feat — one that reaches far beyond all imposed boundaries.
Aurélien Marsais

Higher Than Acidic Clouds, 2025
Terrestrial Verses, 2023
Until Tomorrow, 2022
Disappearance, 2017
The Silence, 2016
The Baby, 2014
More Than Two Hours, 2013