But families, governments and histories have their own ideas about what a relationship is supposed to look like. As passports, visas, marriage certificates and inherited expectations begin to press in, the film turns what could have been a story about an unconventional couple into something more slippery and intimate: a question about who gets to define love, legitimacy and belonging in the first place.
Hadzija and Taheri draw directly from their own lives, casting members of their real families and using fiction as a kind of protective disguise. In their hands, pretending becomes a way of telling the truth. Conversations that might be impossible around a kitchen table become possible once someone can say, “This is a scene.” The result is a film suspended between autobiography and invention, tenderness and bureaucracy, certainty and doubt.
Rather than arguing for one new model of family, I Plant My Hand in the Garden asks whether the very idea of family can remain open-ended, something created through friendship, love, responsibility and choice rather than simply inherited. And in a story shaped as much by intimate affection as by passports and borders, perhaps the most radical gesture is not rejecting tradition altogether, but deciding which parts of it are worth carrying forward.
AM: The film is fictional, but it grows very directly out of your own lives and experiences. At what point did you decide that fiction would allow you to say something that a straightforward autobiographical film or documentary could not?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: We never really made a clear decision that it had to be fiction. It happened quite naturally. We started from things that were very close to our lives, but as soon as we began writing and filming, they started changing. Fiction gave us a little distance and also more freedom. We could exaggerate something, invent something, or put ourselves into situations that never happened exactly like that.
For us, fiction is sometimes a strange way of being more honest. When you are pretending to be someone, or pretending that something is a scene, you can suddenly say things that are actually very difficult to say as yourself.
AM: At the centre of the story is a rather unconventional idea of family: an Iranian refugee woman and a queer Serbian man deciding to marry and raise a child together. Were you interested in questioning the idea that love, marriage, sexuality and parenthood necessarily have to fit into the same traditional structure?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: Yes, but not really in the sense that we wanted to make a film proving that another model is better. It came much more from our own questions. We love each other, but our relationship does not fit very easily into the usual definitions of a couple. At the same time, things like marriage, having a child, or building a family became very real questions for us. We were interested in what happens when you separate these things a little: romantic love, sexuality, friendship, marriage and parenthood. Why do we expect all of them to exist within one relationship?
The film doesn’t really give an answer. We were more interested in whether a family can be something you invent together rather than something whose rules you simply inherit.
AM: You cast members of your actual families, bringing their real relationships, memories and histories into fictional situations. Did the film allow you to have conversations with your families, or say things to one another, that might have been much harder to express directly?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: Definitely. Maybe this was one of the reasons we needed to make the film. There are things that are extremely difficult to sit down with your mother or your family and simply talk about. But when there is a camera and we can say, “This is a scene,” something changes. Everyone has a role to hide behind a little bit.
Sometimes we were playing fictional versions of ourselves, but the emotions underneath were very real. And sometimes our families would say something during a scene that we had never heard them say before. The strange thing was that pretending gave us permission to be more direct with each other.
AM: Bureaucracy plays an important role in the story: passports, marriage and legal status are very tangible things, yet you describe the identities they create as partly imagined. Do you see institutions as having too much power to decide who we are and which relationships are considered legitimate?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: They certainly have a lot of power because their decisions have very real consequences. A passport is just a small object, but depending on which one you have, your whole life can look completely different. The same is true of marriage. It can be something very intimate between two people, but it is also a legal contract that gives a relationship a particular status.
We found this contradiction interesting. These categories are invented by people, but once they exist, they become incredibly concrete. They decide where you can live, who can stay with whom, and who counts as family. At the same time, we don’t think our private lives exist completely outside these structures. We are part of them too. So the film is also about our own attempts to use these institutions, resist them, and sometimes even believe in them.
AM: The film brings together Iranian, Serbian and German realities, alongside different generations and very different ideas about family. While making it, did you discover that the expectations coming from your respective cultures were more similar than you initially imagined?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: Yes, surprisingly often. Of course, Iran and Serbia are very different, and our families have very different histories, but once we started putting them next to each other, some of the expectations felt almost identical, though perhaps not always in the ways one would expect. For us, it became less about comparing cultures and more about seeing how every family creates its own language for love, worry, closeness and letting go.
Germany is present in another way, because it sometimes presents itself as much more individual or liberated, but there are also very strong ideas here about what a proper relationship or family should look like. And some of these ideas become very concrete through what almost feels like a universal language of bureaucracy: marriage certificates, passports, visas, residence permits, all these official categories that try to define who belongs to whom and in what way.
AM: Finally, how does it feel to be part of Venice this year?
Boris Hadzija & Hoda Taheri: It feels very special and still a little unreal. We made the film in such an intimate way, with our families and people very close to us, so being able to bring it to Venice and share it with a much larger audience means a lot to us.
At the same time, there is also something bittersweet about it. Hoda’s mother, Jahandokht, is part of the film and was supposed to be there with us, but unfortunately her visa was denied. In a strange way, it brings us back to something that is already at the centre of the film: how something as simple as a passport or a bureaucratic decision can determine where someone is allowed to be, even in a very personal and important moment. So we are arriving in Venice with a lot of happiness and gratitude, but also carrying her absence with us.