Mohammad Rasoulof | From the trauma of existence to the trauma of exile

Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s short film about a writer in exile, titled Sense of Water, recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). From working under constant repression in his homeland to sending his films clandestinely to festivals like Berlinale and Cannes, for Rasoulof, this is a stark departure. Nevertheless, this freedom has come at a cost. The most prized possession he had — the access to his homeland and the resistance stories he was able to tell — has been seized from him.

In Sense of Water, a forty-minute exploration of immigrant alienation and language politics, a writer contemplates what it means to belong when one must rewire their understanding of words in a foreign language. It follows an Iranian writer whose writer’s block and displacement trauma are compounded by his travails with learning a foreign language.