Iranian Authorities Confiscated Mani Haghighi's Opening Footage

Iranian authorities confiscated the opening footage of Mani Haghighi's documentary I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026) during a raid on the film crew's hotel room in Tabriz. Their stated reason: the footage showed a woman without a headscarf.

The film, which screens in the lineup presented by Film at Lincoln Center, now opens differently than planned. Viewers see stone-faced archivists in a jewel-toned room lined with books and ephemera. They suit up in masks and gloves. They root through garbage bags filled with photo albums, broken pottery, and other artifacts of unknown provenance, caked in dirt and debris.

Haghighi's voice-over narration addresses the substitution directly. "This film wasn't meant to begin this way," the Iranian director says.

The original opening showed a girl standing on a foggy mountain road, searching for a phone signal. Authorities seized that material in the Tabriz raid. Depicting a woman without a headscarf constituted the crew's crime.

What does the film actually document?

I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies is a document of documentation — of discovery, preservation, and remembrance. Haghighi trains his camera on Iranian artist Nasser Bakhshi and his wife, Roghayeh Najdi. The couple maintains a monumental archive of cultural history inside their home, spanning from the pre-Islamic era to the Iranian Revolution and into the present day.

Bakhshi and Najdi come across as charming, eccentrically stylish, and in love. Persian rug dealers whom Haghighi interviews about the couple speak warmly of them — and of their intense shopping habit.

The director raises the question of obsession directly. Haghighi asks aloud whether Bakhshi is a hoarder. The artist answers with a defense of his method. "I collect consciously, methodically, and logically … I'm aware of my instinct," Bakhshi says.

The takeaway: a film about preserving Iranian cultural memory now carries, in its very structure, the record of a state attempt to erase part of it.

The confiscated opening stands as evidence. Haghighi turned an act of censorship into the documentary's frame, and the raid in Tabriz has become inseparable from the archive the film sets out to celebrate.