There Are Things You Don’t Know

Colour, 35 mm
Iran, 2010, 92 min
WP – World premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

Late-shift taxi driver Ali works the "mean streets” of Tehran and in the process he encounters a wide variety of people. The taciturn, disconsolate man meets the owner of the last traditional café in the city, Denis, and the lovely Leila, both of whom start to play an important role among his customers. Ali gets closer to the secretive young woman due to their similar personalities and deep internal isolation. While waiting for an anticipated earthquake to happen, the only apocalypse to shake his deliberately enclosed world is the truth about his love. Behind banal conversations full of unfinished sentences, the protagonists’ pasts betray deep traumas which have deflected them from their original paths in life.... With a nod to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), debut director Fardin Saheb Zamani’s melancholy, disquieting drama tells of alienation and the various roles which people assign themselves and others.

About the director

Fardin Saheb Zamani (b. 1963, Tehran) graduated from Tehran’s University of Art. He has shot three short films and established himself professionally as a sound designer. The drama There Are Things You Don’t Know is his writer-director debut.