IRANIAN DADDY

‘They say I look Iranian. I can see it, but I can’t really feel it’

When Ida worked at Silvan, people started asking her where she was from. She had noticed herself - the dark hair and brown eyes that no one else in her family shared. They’re blonde and Danish. Ida knows why. Her father is from Iran. She’s never met him, even though he practically lives around the corner. Now, Ida is 28, and perfectly happy without a father. He’s merely an estranged man she hardly knows and the thought of contacting him is just another tick on the to do list, just under ‘sort out finances’.

Yet he appears as a main character in the story of Ida’s universe.

He makes himself known through her countless journals, and each time people tell her she doesn’t look Danish.

 To Ida, her father is a blank piece of paper, one where she can write about and to him as she pleases. But she is fully determined that he’ll never be the answer to her question. Ida does not need a father!

 Through Ida’s eyes and with a journey to Iran as the frame of the story, we follow her on an outer and inner search for identity. The notion of a father slowly starts overshadowing Ida’s otherwise unsentimental universe, and maybe Iran can give her the mirroring she has longed for?

 In Denmark, the cinematographer Simon confronts Ida with the fact that the film isn’t really about what she said it would be about, while Ida tries to persuade her mom to tell her what really happened the day her father didn’t want to go get the youghurt.

 “Iranian Daddy’ is a humorous and self-ironic story, of a young woman’s confrontation with herself and her Iranian heritage. What do you do, when everyone sees something in you, that you don’t fully understand?

PROJECT

Title: Iranian Daddy
Director: Ida Mathilde Karlsson
Producer: Emilia Moth, Jesper Jack
Cinematographer: Simon Dixgaard
Editor: Anna Løvkvist
Composer: Anna Løvkvist
Duration: 39 mins
Partners: The Danish Film Workshop / Filmværkstedet

STATUS: World Premiere CPH:DOX 2021