Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others
Io, Maryam, i bambini e altre 26 persone

by
MOVIE CATEGORY
Sheida and Farhad are in a serious marriage crisis. They would be the protagonists of the film, if only the real protagonists weren’t those behind the scenes: Farshad, the director of the film-within-the-film, and Mahboubeh, the skeptical owner of the house that serves as the setting for Farshad’s movie.
A true home invasion, the one directed by Farshad Hashemi with Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others, which in the wake of a long tradition of Iranian metacinema (Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi) moves on two different levels of fiction to reveal cinema as a land of new and practical existential possibilities. The more the sad story of husband and wife unfolds in the “internal” film, the more Mahboubeh, reluctant at first, begins to appreciate the invasion of Farshad’s crew in her own home, with the result that her heated misanthropy turns into something else, with unpredictable consequences.

DIRECTORY

Coming from Iran where he was born in 1989, Farshad Hashemi is writer, director and actor. After three shorts (Why Doesn’t Hossein Sabzevandi Stop Roohi!? in 2009, Room 328 in 2012 and Dental Floss in 2020) he made his first feature-length film, Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others, which was presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024. The movie mixes documentary and fiction and thus the experience of the director with both the formats, whom in fact he has employed for his shorts too.




