META Film Fest: District Terminal

A graveyard of waste and buried cities. The population had either died of the virus or migrated or imprisoned in quarantine blocks. A thick, unrelenting layer of industrial polymers covered all the waters. The layer kept the water from rising to the atmosphere, and so the old, tired earth had not seen any rain for years. The young man and his mother spent the daylight scavenging and the night hiding from the quarantine enforcers. Peyman is a poet who is living in two parallel worlds, in the present world with his mother in an old town in the west of Tehran, the capital of Iran, struggling with drug addiction, poverty and a secret forbidden love affair which has exhausted him, and on the other hand with a bigger challenge fighting with censorship, dictatorship and preservation of the environment, and the increasing fear of a forthcoming war that is becoming more frightening day by day; and another imaginary fictional world, in a near future, and in this story, in their destructed and ruined town which is evacuated and abandoned because of sand storms, global warming and lethal viruses, he and his mother are only seeking survival and trying to stay alive. In the present world, Peyman’s only hope is to save himself from this situation by marrying a woman who lives in USA, and perhaps immigrating from Iran to US via this marriage, which is becoming more out of reach like the everyday complicated life itself. The pressures are increasing, his close friends and relatives are being gone because of the pressures from the dictator government and common hopelessness, and the bad economic situation, loneliness, delusions and dead/imaginary characters like his father or the censor clerk of Ministry of guidance are driving him crazier day by day. Peyman is looking for redemption hopelessly, but what is his main drive to go through his dark life and deprives him of any chance for prosperity, is the Death Instinct, an ambiguous and unknown desire which makes death more accepting for him than life