DWELLING AMONG THE GODS

SYNOPSIS

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Summer 2015. The Hungarian authorities build a high fence at the border with Serbia in order to permanently prevent illegal entering of refugees into their country.
After months of exhausting journey on her way to Europe, a young Afghan woman Fereshteh reaches Belgrade with her husband Reza and three children. Upon arrival, she finds out that her younger brother Ali, who came to Belgrade a few weeks before, has drowned and will soon be buried as an NN person.
Although Fereshteh doesn't have personal documents and can not prove her own identity, she refuses to leave Belgrade before burying her brother under his name. In order to get the permit to take over the body, she initiates a complex and uncertain procedure to prove her brother's identity through a DNA sample of her father who is still in Afghanistan.
Rare persons who can understand her struggle, a translator for Persian, Nikola, and a young lawyer working with refugees, Zoran, become Fereshteh's only allies. A special, friendly relationship is established, although Fereshteh’s persistence is often unbearable.
Her whole life, Fereshteh has been following her father's will
indisputably. Not this time. Contrary to her father's orders, she decides to act on her own and carry out the funeral on her own terms.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTE

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The protagonist of the story is subordinate in many ways – first as a woman in a conservative and patriarchal community, and then, as an asylum seeker with no personal documents, money or basic rights on her long journey to Europe.
For people who are faced with extreme circumstances, the desire to survive is the priority. But, is the purpose of life only to survive? In fact, is such a life worth living?
The heroine is driven by an impulse that is stronger than life – powerful, uncontrollable and irrational. Her endeavor to bury her brother raises a fundamental question of her being: her love, faith, identity, and dignity.
Dwelling Among the Gods gains archetypal power and full allegorical meaning when compared to one of the most significant stories of Western civilization – Sophocles' Antigone. Dwelling Among the Gods is a new take of that ancient story in which issues such as democracy, civilization, culture, the position of women, law and the state, are reinterpreted in a new complex geopolitical and civilizational context.
The strength of the main character is the love that is the purest and most unconditional love that exists – sister's love for her brother. With the power of that love, she manages to push her intention to a painful and shocking end.

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Dwelling Among the Gods is a true story of a common woman who becomes a heroine of monstrous beauty by her uncompromising desire.
She is a heroine who has the strength to move mountains, but who, like all of us, is powerless to change the world we live in.