Shahriyar, a garbage collector, has a passion for literature and poetry. He writes imaginative stories to escape from his dull, prosaic life in Kermanshah, a city in Iran’s Kurdistan region. But his wife, his family, his neighborhood and all the people around him constantly conspire to hold him back from "Moving Up".

Article of Nicolas Feodoroff in FID Marseille 2011

Shahriyar is a garbage man in Kermanshah, Kurdistan. His everyday life: rubbish and trash. But his mind is elsewhere. His life is literature. There’s a book on a shelf or dropped on the ground? Shariar loses himself in reading at the risk of forgetting the world, his family and the demands of his job. His tastes are eclectic: he values Jack London as much as Shakespeare, Dostoievesky or Samuel Beckett, a photograph of the latter decorates the wall of his room. But reading isn’t enough; he also writes, obstinately, filling notebooks, journals, pages and scraps of paper with love stories populated with beautiful princesses with blue eyes decked out in brightly-colored costumes. Of this ardent vocation, he wanted to make a profession, but everything stands in the way of the advancement evoked by the title. A lack of understanding from his wife and his colleagues, a caustic criticism from aspiring writers like him in a writing workshop, harassment by his neighbors and repeated rejections from publishers. The only audience ready to follow his flights of fancy, an auditory of domestic pigeons on his terrace; enclosed behind bars, they, too, are unable to reach the heavens. For his first film, Loghman Khaledi delivers the melancholy portrait of a man wrestling with his dreams. With neither condencension nor smug naivety, Khaledi makes his character the manifest ambassador of forbidden hopes, struggling against the dampening conformisim of a society where everyone is obliged to remain in his place.

FILMOGRAPHY