Document Tell Me of the Seas

Tell Me of the Seas
Reza Allamehzadeh, Iran/Netherlands 2014, 71m, UK Premiere

A tale of two mothers and two daughters: one set imagined (Roya and Darya), the other real (Azar and Nina)- all four of whom share the same prison cell.

Imaginary Roya is a young sketch artist who is arrested on the day her exhibition was to open in Tehran. Real Azar is a young mother incarcerated with her daughter Nina in Evin prison.

An unusual combination of actual with imagined histories, these elements interplay to form a powerful narrative around events which were all too real: using "Roya’s drawings" (from infant Nina’s first steps in prison to her own appearance before the Death Committee) to describe the shocking- and true- story of political prisoners killed as a result of Khomeini’s Fatwa in 1988, and buried in unmarked mass graves in Khavaran.

Does Darya- the imaginary daughter of Roya- get the chance to fulfill her mother's wishes by finding Nina and retrieving the lost sketches of her own childhood in prison?