Unearthing Collective Memory: Mani Haghighi’s ‘I Deserve a Lover’ Set for NYFF World Premiere
NEW YORK — As the global cinematic community turns its focus toward the intellectual and artistic epicenters of the fall festival circuit, the New York Film Festival (NYFF) has positioned itself to host one of the most provocative and fiercely anticipated documentary world premieres of the year. Acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi is returning to the international stage with a feature bearing a title as sweeping and poetic as its subject matter: I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies.
Slated to premiere on September 30 during the festival’s run from September 25 through October 12, the documentary represents a vital continuation of Haghighi’s career-long defiance of easy categorization. Centered on the monumental, borderland archival efforts of Iranian painter, conceptual artist, and curator Nasser Bakhshi—alongside his partner, surrealist painter Roghayeh Najdi—the film explores the intersections of art, political preservation, and the suffocating weight of state authority.
The screening of Haghighi’s latest work will be preceded by South of Tehran, a new short film by The Station Agent and Aquarius director Kleber Mendonça Filho. The companion short centers on the experiences of legendary Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi at the previous year’s NYFF, weaving a broader thematic tapestry of artistic resilience, displacement, and international solidarity under repressive political regimes.
Chronology of a Crisis: The Genesis of an Archive
To understand the visceral urgency of I Deserve a Lover, one must trace the timeline of geopolitical trauma and domestic upheaval from which it was forged—a sequence of events explicitly detailed by Haghighi in his directorial statement.
The film was shot in September 2025, sitting at a perilous crossroads in modern Iranian history. Production commenced precisely three months after the conclusion of the Twelve-Day War, an intense military escalation waged against Iran by the United States and Israel. This immediate geopolitical fallout compounded an already volatile domestic landscape, setting the stage for what Haghighi describes as a profound psychological paralysis.
Just four months following the wrap of principal photography, the winter months brought a brutal massacre of Iranian protesters by government security forces. Caught in the machinery of escalating international conflict and domestic state violence, Haghighi found himself grappling with a profound sense of powerlessness.
"The most insidious effect of that period on me was a kind of mental paralysis: there was nothing I could do about what was happening around me, and the coordinates of my life were no longer mine to determine," Haghighi shared in his director’s statement.
Faced with a landscape of "vast, moronic darkness," Haghighi chose a path of creative resistance. Rather than attempting to capture the macro-level violence directly—an endeavor likely to be heavily censored or physically impossible—he turned inward, gathering his friends to concentrate on "images and words that could still mean something to us." This impulse led him to the northwestern city of Tabriz, and into the sprawling, labyrinthine home of artists Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi.
The Art of Hoarding History: Inside Bakhshi and Najdi’s Sanctuary
Upon entering the residence of Bakhshi and Najdi, Haghighi encountered an environment that defied conventional domesticity. The home functioned as a living, breathing monument characterized by what the director describes as "the atmosphere of deranged hoarding shaped by obsessive order."
Bakhshi, a multifaceted figure working as a painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator, has spent decades assembling a staggering archive of found objects, artifacts, and recovered non-official historical documents. Spanning timelines from the pre-Islamic era through the turbulence of the modern Islamic Republic, the archive is a sui generis repository of collective memory.
In a nation where official state narratives frequently sanitize, rewrite, or outright erase individual stories and unorthodox histories, Bakhshi’s archiving process transcends hobbyism. Excavating, labeling, storing, and preserving discarded material culture serves as both a deeply artistic statement and a radical political act. Every saved document, forgotten photograph, and discarded domestic relic acts as a counter-weight to state-mandated oblivion.
Operating in tandem with Bakhshi is his partner, Roghayeh Najdi. While Bakhshi collects the tangible remnants of collective history, Najdi’s surrealist paintings offer a psychological and social commentary on the contemporary era, with a particular focus on the lived realities, marginalization, and resilience of women within Iranian society. Together, the couple operates as a singular cultural ecosystem—two figures locked in a private language, maintaining a defiant archive out of the public eye.
Official Responses and Curatorial Perspectives
The NYFF programming synopsis underscores the singular nature of Haghighi’s cinematic voice within contemporary Iranian cinema, noting his consistent refusal to conform to predictable genre expectations.
"In profiling Bakhshi, alongside his partner, Roghayeh Najdi… Haghighi comes up with a distinct visual language, one that feels in dialogue with filmmakers from Bergman to Parajanov," the festival’s notes state. The programming committee highlights how Bakhshi’s museum-archive in Tabriz directly addresses the urgent modern necessity for localized, individual narratives to reclaim the broader historical picture.
Haghighi himself experienced a transformative shift in perspective while documenting the couple. What began as an observational documentary quickly mutated into a participatory feedback loop.
"It soon became clear that everything I was doing was itself becoming part of the archive I was trying to capture," Haghighi noted. "I wasn’t simply making a film about it: I was entering it and feeding it. But this time, ceding control felt like liberation."
This blurring of boundaries between documentarian and subject, observer and archive, positions the film not merely as a clinical study of two artists, but as an active participant in the very preservation effort it seeks to chronicle.
Global Implications: Sales, Distribution, and the Future of Iranian Cinema
As I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies prepares for its high-profile bow at the Lincoln Center on September 30, its trajectory on the international film market is already taking shape.
International sales for the film are being managed by Films Boutique, one of the industry’s premier arthouse sales agents known for championing boundary-pushing global cinema. As of its NYFF premiere, the film is actively seeking a U.S. distribution partner—a process that will be closely watched by cinephiles and human rights advocates alike, given the increasing difficulties faced by Iranian artists seeking a platform in Western markets amid tightened sanctions, shifting geopolitical tensions, and visa complications.
Broader Implications for Art Under Duress
The film arrives at a critical juncture for transnational cinema. When artists in nations like Iran face compounding pressures from both external military threats (such as the recent U.S.-Israeli conflicts documented by Haghighi) and internal state crackdowns, the role of independent art shifts from commercial entertainment to essential historical preservation.
By centering a documentary on private hoarding as political resistance, Haghighi poses profound questions to global audiences:
- Who owns history? When governments systematically scrub cultural memory, what responsibilities do independent citizens and artists bear to salvage the remnants?
- Can cinema act as a secure archive? By embedding his own filmmaking process into Bakhshi’s physical archive, Haghighi suggests that film itself can serve as an indestructible vault for narratives threatened with physical destruction.
As the lights go down in New York on September 30, audiences will not only bear witness to a stylistic tour de force from one of Iran’s most resilient filmmakers, but they will also step inside a makeshift fortress of memory—proving that even in the darkest political winters, the human drive to remember, collect, and create cannot be completely extinguished.
