In the unnerving docu “Third Land,” director and Iranian émigré Farzad Khoshdast chronicles the permanent limbo of a family living on the margins in Turkey. Screening at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival this week, the film follows an Iranian engineer, his wife, Hananeh, and son as they deal with the daily contradictions of life as refugees in a third land – that is, one where their refugee status has been recognized by international aid organizations but their legal residence has not been. Khoshdast, who more than once risked arrest while filming his subjects, says he felt it was essential to capture the bare bones of his subjects’ existence.
Gaining their trust, he says, took “around two years, perhaps a little less, but across three distinct periods. I had become familiar with their lives and understood the repetitive cycle of their daily routines. I decided to bring together footage shot during those three periods as the film’s opening three episodes, creating the impression that everything was happening over just one or two days, as though three crews had been filming simultaneously.” He calls this approach to storytelling, and the way it brings different periods of time together, “one of the film’s important structural features.” Khoshdast and his wife were traveling in Turkey about four years ago, he says.
I told him about my own life and the harm I had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hamid asked me, ‘If I tell you my story, will you write it down?’ I replied, ‘As it happens, I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I’d like to make a film about you.’ They later invited us into their home, and everything began to take the shape I had hoped for as a filmmaker.” Indeed, Hamid’s family shares the exhaustion, trauma and confusion they experience as they face maddening delays in getting work permits while forced to find employment under the table. Meanwhile, a sense of paranoia grows as police interest represents a constant threat.
We were detained two or three times. The most serious incident happened in Ankara, some time after a terrorist attack. One night, following the filming of an elevator scene, officers came to Hamid’s home intending to detain me.
Friends intervened that night and gave assurances that I would report to the police station the following day.” “On another occasion, a Turkish citizen falsely reported that we had been filming President Erdoğan’s home! When I was detained, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I had filmed inside prisons in Iran and had been arrested there, but this was something else entirely.” As worries grew that Hamid and his family might be under surveillance, their story became still more complicated.
It illustrates what may be happening to as many as half a million Iranians who have been forced to flee their home country, the director says. They have left their homeland, yet in a sense they have not truly been able to begin a new life elsewhere. They remain in limbo.” “Many eventually return home with nothing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
