My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. This was already back in 2012, when I had only been in Germany for a few months and already Skyped with my family many times. I told her that these recordings were like my diaries. I said I was too lazy to write them down and, even if I had done so, I would never have been able to capture with words the essence of all those moments in such detail so precisely and so faithfully.
How could I describe the moment when I secretly watched my mother knitting a jumper in front of the webcam, humming a song to herself as she waited for me? How can I put into words how it felt when my father asked me if I liked him, and I couldn't give him a serious answer? “The camera doesn't lie,” Abbas Kiarostami used to say in his workshop. “One can trust the camera.” That’s why I recorded those moments.
My mother asked if I planned to make a film out of the footage. “Absolutely not,” I said. “I would never expose such personal material.” She didn’t believe me and she was right. Back then, how could she already know what would happen ten years later?
Now, after the film is done, I'm not so sure if I can really “trust the camera”. Every day in the editing room, I could have created a new, different family. At times, my father was the nicest person any child could wish for, at others, the devil on Earth. Sometimes, I was the most humorous son, entertaining my parents endlessly; at other moments I was completely absent, as if they didn’t have a son. And my mother? She was ever constant, always the same person, and rightly so: loving, extremely sympathetic, smart and above all fierce.
What interested me most were the little narratives that emerge when people love each other.
So how could a camera that doesn’t lie allow me to come out of the editing room every day with a new version of our family? That remains a mystery to me. I no longer recall which moments in the film really happened and which were staged during the edit. But I also don't know if the “staged” moments might not portray our real family even better than the “real” ones.
When I showed the movie to my parents to get their approval, my dad only got upset about one scene and claimed it was staged, unlike all the other “real” scenes. But that scene was among the most consistently “real” ones.
I never intended to make a faithful documentary about the Fesharaki family. What interested me most were the little narratives that emerge when people love each other. I found the moments recorded by the loyal webcam incredibly precious, which I was indeed able to rely on in the end, as everything that took place in front of it was grounded in love and longing.
And maybe through this film, the spectator will get a picture of a family and realise how the beloved revolution of my parents’ generation was stolen from them and how the brutal oppression that followed ruined not only their lives, but also those of their children. But there is one thing that keeps us all together: hope.
Faraz Fesharaki
Translation: James Lattimer
