“A film more to be experienced than dissected. And what an experience it is!”

“I plant my hands in the garden
I will grow,
I know, I know, I know
and the swallows will lay eggs
in the hollows of my inky fingertips” – Reborn, Forugh Farrokhzad

Life is in constant flux, without us seeming to have any control over it. But we can try to get the most out of it. In Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija’s wonderfully elusive I Plant My Hand in the Garden, the two directors examine the fluidity of sexuality, identity, and time in a labyrinthine narrative that the audience has to ride like a bucking horse. Exquisitely framed and blocked, Taheri and Hadžija’s film is puzzling to the point where you have to give up trying to find coherence in the narrative, and just give in to its rhythms and its poetry. Certainly one of the year’s most befuddling works, I Plant My Hand in the Garden is a film more to be experienced than dissected. And what an experience it is!

Hoda (played by Taheri) is an Iranian woman now living in Germany, about to be married to Serbian piano teacher Boris (as expected, played by Hadžija). She is also pregnant with his child. As the film opens she is on a video call with her mother and sister back in Rasht, Iran; they discuss getting visas for the two women so they can be present for Hoda’s wedding. Boris’ family manages to get them to Serbia, but language barriers keep the two families apart, wonderfully illustrated in a breakfast scene in which the audio shifts from Serbian to Farsi as each side of the table has their own conversation. The Iranians ponder whether Hoda’s father was gay; he never acted upon it, her mother assures her. The Serbian side of the family discuss Boris’ estranged father, who will ruin the wedding by disappearing, and then resurfacing at a fancy Belgrade hotel having racked up a hefty bill. Fathers are a recurring theme in this film.

It is at this point that the ground starts moving under the audience’s feet. Both Boris and Hoda’s sexuality shifts unexpectedly, and that is just the beginning. Time starts to move back and forth in the same location, the fourth wall is broken, and Hoda’s pregnancy is in doubt. The second half consistently puts its audience on the wrong foot, and this maelstrom is heralded by the film’s most spectacular and bold shot (it will not be the last one): muffled sound over a vague pink-reddish image that slowly pulls back before exiting Hoda through her vagina. It’s a slap in the face and an indelible image, but there is a logic to it, because it is here that Hoda, and with her the narrative, is reborn. As in the poem quoted above from which the film must surely get its title, there is a regenerative power at work here.

Besides bending minds, I Plant My Hand in the Garden also briefly touches upon the violently suppressed protests in Iran, almost in passing as the women get their nails done in a salon. To some extent this feels shoehorned in, even though in the original conception of the film the focus would have been more on the protests (although earlier than the January 2026 wave) and their repercussions for Hoda’s sister. Taheri and Hadžija have shifted it more towards Hoda, though the idea of fractured family bonds and issues around heteronormativity remain. When it comes to the filmmaking, this is not a film that just plays with time. It toys with space too, and not just because characters move through time in the same space. The film has some of the most beautifully blocked shots, frequently using mirrors or other physical barriers to create either emotional distance or closeness. The frames may seem mundane, particularly because most scenes have flat lighting, but look closer and you see the little details that show how much thought has gone into them.

Life in the film is as an ever-changing stream, and we have no control over the hand we are dealt. Forugh Farrokhzad, a controversial feminist poet in the Iran of 1960, tried to channel her struggle in her poetry; Taheri and Hadžija visualize a similar struggle in I Plant My Hand in the Garden, a confounding, thought-provoking experience that feels like an unsolvable puzzle that’s not meant to be solved.