I made CESAREAN WEEKEND at a time when life in Iran is defined by tension, exhaustion, and sudden breaks. Now, at the moment of the film’s release, the country has just gone through a historic, unprecedented massacre of protesters and is trapped in a brutal environment that offers neither safety nor dignity to its inhabitants.
The story follows a small group of people over a single weekend, but what interested me was not the event itself. It was the fragile space between generations: what is passed on, what is withheld, and what can no longer be carried. In today’s Iran, family bonds are often where social conflicts surface most sharply. Love, care, responsibility, and authority collide in intimate spaces, long before they become public or political.
I did not want to make a film that explains the situation in Iran or turns suffering into spectacle. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the reality in which the film was made. Independent filmmaking here means working under constant restriction, limited access to resources, surveillance, censorship, and the knowledge that your work may never be shown publicly. These conditions are not abstract; they shape every decision.
Rather than offering solutions or moral conclusions, CESAREAN WEEKEND insists on presence. It insists on bodies that cannot fully comply, on relationships that resist simple definitions, on moments of closeness that exist despite control. The film does not claim freedom but it refuses to erase the desire for it.
Mohammad Shirvani
