HASHTI Tehran

Hashti, in most traditional houses in Iran, is an octagonal space of distribution and circulation to direct the person towards the various parts of the house, the private (andarouni) and semi-public (birouni) reserved for the reception from abroad and the access to spaces of service. Based on the idea that Tehran itself represents a house, so to speak the inner circle of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the outskirts of the city become the space of transition between inside and outside, between urban and non-urban. Thus the film looks at urban developments in four very different areas in the outskirts of Tehran: the mountain of Tochal in the north, the area around the artificial Lake Chitgar in the west, the construction of social housing called Pardis Town in the far east, and the neighborhood Nafar Abad at the southern edges of the city. (Berlinale)