THE STORY – Iranian filmmaker Mani Haghighi’s documentary profiles Nasser Bakhshi, a painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator—and some would say hoarder—whose monumental archive creates a record of collective memory.
THE CAST – Nasser Bakhshi & Roghayeh Najdi
THE TEAM – Mani Haghighi (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 76 Minutes
Amid the thousands of lives lost and infrastructure destroyed during the last half-century in Iran, there was the quiet erasure of an entire culture. In both the era of the Shah and the years after the 1979 revolution, both regimes took the same cultural tack: destroy anything—documents, photographs, personal letters—that didn’t conform to the official state narrative. At last, many of these cultural treasures are now being unearthed by a team of scouts, junk dealers and sorting managers, many of whom are being financed by collectors. One such collecting team is a married couple, Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi, who have created a massive museum archive in Tabriz which holds their collection of over 120,000 historical documents, manuscripts, and pre-Islamic artifacts. That collection, and the eccentric couple behind it, are the focus of this latest documentary by Iranian director Mani Haghighi, “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies.”
In his past documentaries, Haghighi has been drawn to artists who have forged their own paths and are obsessive about their work, so profiling a collector as dedicated as Bakhshi is a logical next step. A man of many talents, Bakhshi is known as a painter, conceptual artist, collector, and curator, and he has amassed enormous wealth over the years, much of which he has used to fund both his collecting and archival efforts. A highly regarded artist, Bakhski is best known as a portrait painter, using as his subjects the vintage photographs he has collected over the years. But he is the first to argue that his museum collection of Iranian artifacts is his true masterpiece.
Haghighi, in fact, opens his film with footage of the artifacts collected in the digs being sorted out by Bakhshi’s (mostly female) team of handlers. Wearing surgical gloves and masks, the handlers sift through and sort bags of trash, throwing out obvious garbage. Because Bakhshi isn’t present to direct operations, the sorters presumably select what to keep according to the boss’s directives. So it’s surprising to see just how many items that can only be described as junk are actually kept and claimed as artifacts. Though the film presents Bakhski as a selective collector, the junk he chooses to keep leads the viewer to suspect he is more of a hoarder than a discriminating collector. Bakhski argues that by keeping everything, he is protecting remnants of Iranian culture that the current regime is trying to erase. Still, one wonders how objects Iranians throw in the trash contribute to that culture.
Yet his collection has produced several enormously valuable artifacts. The most compelling is a photo album containing pictures of young girls and women kidnapped from their homes to become sex slaves. The photos, taken by a former prison guard and featuring images of girls as young as 10 or 11, were suppressed from government records, with Bakhski’s album being the only evidence. To Haghighi’s credit, he did pursue more information about human trafficking in Iran, but the footage he shot was kept in a warehouse that was ultimately destroyed by bombs during the current war.
Haghighi took that extra step, yet the film suggests Bakhski is the champion of the marginalized and persecuted. Certainly, there are artifacts shown, such as love letters or photos of queer couples, that might support that belief, but the film fails to connect the dots back to any kind of political fervor from the collector. Instead, he comes across as a man whose collecting is tied to his ego, and who can go to extreme lengths to control both his public image and his collection.
The most blatant example is how he treats his sorting staff, strictly enforcing rules of behavior that may seem questionable. On the job, for example, workers are banned from wearing digital watches, since their movements can be tracked. His rules even extend to workers’ lives outside the workplace, as he has forbidden them from having boyfriends or any other kind of personal relationships. His workers are most upset by the hypocrisy this reveals: an employer who prides himself on championing the common man runs his shop like an authoritarian. Yet when given the chance to confront Bakhski on this double standard, Haghighi backs off, letting the collector wave away his employees’ concerns as trivial.
This lack of follow-through on Haghighi’s part is the film’s primary problem. To take on the subject of cultural erasure by Iran’s governmental forces, a surface-level examination is not enough. If Bakhshi claims to be the champion of those without a voice, a documentarian should dig deeper to see whether that assertion is genuine and what steps he personally took to put that belief into action. Taking his word and showing his collection is not enough if it can’t be backed up. But you need a filmmaker willing to do that.
Instead, Haghighi takes Bakhshi’s offhand remark that he doesn’t like tattoos and turns it into an entire sequence of Iranians showing off the ink on their bodies. I suppose you could argue that the scene is included to show another way to archive a nation’s history, though what a tattoo of the “Interstellar” film logo says about Iran is questionable. Worse, the film treats Najdi as Bakhshi’s equal partner in business and in life. Yet she gets only one segment to display and explain her art, which has been acclaimed as among the best of contemporary feminist artists. Otherwise, she is seen relegated to sitting quietly in the back seat of a private car beside her husband, a dismissal that may reflect the role of women in contemporary Iran today.
These kinds of missed opportunities make “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” so disappointing. Even at 76 minutes, the film (tattoo segment and all) still feels padded. If they’d taken the time to follow one more lead or ask one more question, we might have gotten a more substantive look at how rescuing cultural artifacts from destruction can preserve a nation’s precious history. “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” may be pretty to look at, but there’s precious little beneath its glossy surface that’s lasting.
