Writers and Directors: Boris Hadzij and Hoda Taheri
Boris Hadzij and Hoda Taheri’s film I Plant My Hand in the Garden screening at the BFI London Film Festival is a series of vaguely connected scenarios that touch on sexuality, immigration and asylum as well as the possibility of parenthood. Across a rather long-seeming 75-minutes, the film delves into none of these ideas in any depth but offers a merely fluid assortment of experiences and people who connect in ways that are sometimes interesting and surprising but also fairly baffling and sometimes dull. The sense of abstraction pulls against a desire to tell a more linear narrative, but Hadzij and Taheri cannot help a final moment of absurdism leaving the audience wondering what any of it was all about.
Boris and Hoda are about to get married in Germany where their Iranian and Serbian heritage combines. Having achieved asylum through slightly dishonest means, Hoda is now pregnant but while their parental relationships remain complex, so too does their sexual history with both Hoda and Boris having had same sex relationships as well as being with each other. How those two ideas come together is the question.
Hoda and Boris are presented as a couple but also as two separate entities in a story that covers several months in their lives during which time reality, memory and fantasy blur together without always letting the audience know which aspects are true. Sometimes that technique works well including a scene in which Hoda tells Boris how she and her ex-partner destroyed her passport and took assumed names which blurs into a recreation of that earlier event but still staged in the couple’s new flat. There’s a nascent idea in there about the ways that memories and identities form us in the present although it’s less well articulated elsewhere in the film.
We see cuts to strangely staged sex scenes, Boris discussing his one-night stand’s children which he knew nothing about, Hoda failing to have sex with another women wearing a dildo. The writer-directors also provide a deeply intimate shot of Hoda’s vagina during a pre-natal examination, drawing out from the muscles of her womb and to the exterior sex organs on which the camera lingers. Given what happens at the end of the film, it becomes less clear what these scenes tell us except that the creators playing themselves in the film want the fluidity of their sexuality to both define and not define them.
Other parts of the story focus on Hoda and Boris’ relationships with their respective mothers, linking back to mother’s intuition, more discussions about visas and some collaboration. Again, there are nice scenes of the two parents using a interpreter app on their phone to communicate with each other but alas the film probably needed to do the same for the audience who leave feeling this was all rather lost in translation.
I Plant My Hand in the Garden is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
