Empty Nets

Amir loves Narges and Narges loves Amir. They dream of building a life together. What sounds so simple can suddenly come up against insurmountably high hurdles in Iran. Because Amir (Hamid Reza Abbasi) loses his job - and that makes marriage a distant prospect - the bride price that Iranian tradition demands of him is too high. In the hope of overcoming class differences through hard work, Amir signs on with a rural fisherman on the rough coast of the Caspian Sea, where he becomes entangled in criminal machinations involving illegal caviar poaching and night-time betting games. Amir is increasingly drawn into a maelstrom that also jeopardizes his relationship with Narges (Sadaf Asgari). In the end, he has to decide whether to give up or make a fresh start... Impressively and with great sensitivity for his characters, Iranian-German director Behrooz Karamizade addresses the lack of prospects for Iranian youth in a corrupt society frozen in its conventions. He won the German Screenplay Award in 2021 with the screenplay for “Empty Nets”. His editor Anne Jünemann received the German Camera Award for Best Editing in 2024. “In his feature film debut, Behrooz Karamizade draws on fairytale elements, even if a social realist style dominates. But this friction is precisely the quality of this excellently written and convincingly directed film, which is also a political drama. [...] The narrative is pleasantly unagitated, although the drama of the plot steadily increases. The way Amir goes off the rails step by step is tense and painful. Because everything he does, no matter how reprehensible, with the fishermen he joins to earn money, he does out of conviction. What he desperately wants is to win the hand of his girlfriend.” (FBW jury statement: “Particularly valuable”) “Director Karamizade works with strong contrasts. He contrasts the few daylight scenes at the beginning with the nocturnal actions of the fishermen, and the interiors are often bathed in a gloomy light (camera: Ashkan Ashkani). “Empty Nets” is an Iranian film noir as a metaphor for a country sinking into darkness. “In this country, you always end up in a dead end,” says the persecuted journalist Omid, Amir's roommate, who wants to buy the help of the fishermen in order to cross the sea to get abroad. Escape as a way out of a lack of prospects. The film does not need a striking indictment to make these conditions visible.” (Raimund Gerz, on: epd-film.de)