Asian Cinema Fund

ACF Asian Cinema Fund

Script Development Fund

2022 Script Development Fund

LIST In the Land of Brothers

Category	Asian Project
Project	In the Land of Brothers
Director	Raha AMIRFAZLI, Alireza GHASEMI
Country	France, Iran, Netherlands
Director's Profile	Raha Amirfazli is an Iranian filmmaker who graduated from the Art University of Tehran in Film Directing. She has made several short films that have earned her national and international screenings, including Solar Eclipse. In addition to serving as a referee in the Danish journal Short Film Studies, she also served as the editor-in-chief of the 24 Frames website. Raha is currently advancing her studies in the MFA Film Production program of New York University. She is working on her first feature-length project In the Land of Brothers. Writer and Director of In the Land of Brothers (2023) Co-writer, Co-director and Executive Producer of Solar Eclipse (2020) (Short Film) Writer, Director and Producer in Nausea (2018) (Short Film) Writer, Director and Producer in A Tehran′s Symphony (2018) (Short Documentary Film) Writer, Director and Producer in Madness (2017) (Short Film)

Synopsis: Four stories of Afghan families struggling to survive in Iran, from 1990 to 2020. Intimate tales of loss and violence, bound together by their love, that ultimately helps them survive.

In the Land of Brothers is the intertwined story of Afghan refugees of Iran, in three decades. Starting in 1990, there is a ten-year gap between each episode.
Masoumeh: An Afghan woman is searching for her missing husband who hasn′t come home in two days, in the middle of a riot in Mashhad. Her daughter Hanieh is losing her hearing and wonders where her father is.
Mohammad: A teenage Afghan boy is constantly being captured by the police and taken to the station for forced labor. His family works precariously in greenhouses, and he needs to find a solution on his own.
Leila: A female janitor finds her husband dead before the new year′s big celebration. As she and her son are illegally living in Iran, she needs to bury her husband without the house owners noticing, otherwise she might be deported.
Qasem: The brother of Leila finds out his son had been killed in a proxy war in Syria. The government wants to grant citizenship to the Afghan families that′ve lost sons. The man struggles to reveal this to his wife Hanieh.

Director's Note: In writing this film, we tried to understand the perspective of the Afghan refugees towards the Iranian society, to dig into the issues that are theirs: survival, identity, dignity, rights, etc. and to show what happens to family, friends and love relationships in such a violent social environment. We cannot tell this story without expressing the multiplicity of fates it affects and the spectrum of forms it takes. The four parts, spanning three decades, each carry their own message, while providing a backdrop to this suffocating social reality. This film, through its naturalistic approach, is suited to casting amateur actors among the Hazara community. Their personal experiences will add a lot to the intensity and authenticity of the acting.

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