Mantagheye payani

Tehran in the near future. Pollution and a lethal virus have reduced the city to a dump and forced the population to emigrate or live in quarantine. Peyman is a poet and a junkie who lives with his mother in a neighbourhood that has been placed under round-the-clock surveillance by quarantine officers. Struggling to survive, Peyman divides his days between spending time with his no-less-bewildered teenage daughter, a woman living in the USA whom he has married in order to emigrate, conversations with his two closest friends Ramin and Mozhgan, and an illicit affair with a girl with whom he is hopelessly in love. Rumours of an imminent war are growing and one by one Peyman’s friends are departing, leaving him alone and tormented by ghosts. In which world does Peyman live, the real or the fictional? In which of the two will he find redemption? Bardia Yadegari and Ehsan Mirhosseini have written and directed a unique and surprising film. Political and visionary, tragic and desperately human, District Terminal ponders the present and warns us about the future. (Berlinale)