An owl, a garden and the writer

Multidisciplinary artist Sara Dolatabadi, whose itinerant life has been led her across the globe, returned to Iran to make An Owl, A Garden and the Writer, her feature length debut with executive production by another legendary filmmaker in exile: Amir Naderi. It is a captivating portrait of her own father, novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, an enigmatic figure who has endured misery, jail time, revolution, censorship, yet has always decided to remain in his country. By building a bridge between her father's creative universe and her daughter's imaginative innocence (a girl who develops a powerful inner world), Sara Dolatabadi sets out on a search for the writer hiding behind the progenitor, while also sketching out a lucid intergenerational portrait of Iran's past and present and painting the future as an unknown that can only be made bearable by creating a shell of fiction. (JHE)