Fireflies
Luciérnagas
Mexico / 2018 / 75 min. / Drama
Luis Alberti (Actor) will be present for Q&A after the screening.
When Ramin hid on a cargo ship leaving Turkey, he never expected to end up in Veracruz, Mexico by accident. As a young gay man, he fled the persecution in his home country, Iran, with the hopes of making it to somewhere in Europe. Now, having arrived on the other side of the world, he is desperately looking for a way to travel back across the ocean, while coping with the distance that he has taken with his boyfriend and his past. But the paradox of his feelings is immense.
Ramin begins to explore local relationships, sometimes full of ambiguity. He lives in a small, family-run motel, where he slowly becomes close with the manager, Leti, a Veracruzan woman who is also in a sort of limbo. Her boyfriend has not contacted her since going to the United States a few years back, leaving her distraught and abandoned. Now that she hears that he is coming home, Leti is all of sudden confronted with her past. In order to save money, Ramin works precarious jobs with other migrants around the city. This is where he meets Guillermo, an ex-gang member from El Salvador who left his country as the only chance to get away from his past and the violence. It is here in Veracruz that they share their solitude of migration, as well as intimate moments in which they understand that their plight may be different, yet quite the same.
About The Director
Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran in 1977, and moved to the United States during the revolution in 1979. She studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas at Austin, and then moved to France in 1999, where she would live until 2008. In 2004 she made the short film TRANSIT (Grand Jury Prize – Premiers Plans Angers, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo Mostra, nominated for Jean Vigo Prize and Critic’s Prix Novaïs-Terxeira). In 2008, she was studio artist at the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. Her work has shown in galleries and museums in Tehran, NYC, Paris, Cairo, Mexico City, Berlin and Rotterdam. Bani lives in Mexico City, where she just finishe her second feature film, FIREFLIES.
