Third Land follows an Iranian family trapped in legal limbo

By Marcus Bennett

Farzad Khoshdast says gaining the trust of Hamid’s family took around two years, perhaps less. The Iranian émigré director said the project unfolded across three distinct periods. He joined footage from each as the film’s opening three episodes, compressing separate days into the impression of one or two filmed simultaneously by three crews.

By presenting three separately recorded periods as consecutive episodes, Khoshdast turns bureaucratic delay and emotional repetition into an experience that feels continuous rather than fragmented. He called this approach to temporal compression one of the film’s important structural features.

Khoshdast’s documentary follows Hamid, an Iranian engineer, his wife, Hananeh, and their son in Turkey. It screened at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival this week and screens in the Czech Joy section through Nov. 1.

According to Khoshdast, international aid organizations recognize the family’s refugee status, but the family has no legal residence. The film places their exhaustion, trauma and confusion inside a permanent limbo shaped by work-permit delays and the need to earn under the table.

Trust built across three filming periods

About four years ago, Khoshdast and his wife were traveling in Turkey when they met Hamid and his family. Khoshdast said he told Hamid about his own life and the harm he had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Hamid asked whether Khoshdast would write down his story. Khoshdast replied that he was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to make a film about the family. The family later invited the couple into their home, and the project began to take shape.

Once invited into their home, he filmed the family’s work, waiting, daily routines and emotional breakdowns, recording hardship without turning fear into dramatic spectacle onscreen. Khoshdast said familiarity with the repetitive cycle of their lives determined the film’s opening structure.

Detention and false accusations

The crew filmed in three locations: Ankara, the main location; Alanya, where Hananeh worked; and an industrial town near Istanbul, where Hamid worked. Khoshdast said: “The circumstances were extremely tense and frightening. We were detained two or three times.”

The most serious incident occurred in Ankara some time after a terrorist attack, Khoshdast said. One night, after filming an elevator scene, officers came to Hamid’s home intending to detain the director. Friends intervened and assured him that he would report to the police station the next day.

On another occasion, a Turkish citizen falsely reported that the crew had been filming President Erdoğan’s home, Khoshdast said. He recalled thinking he would have a heart attack during the detention. He had filmed inside prisons in Iran and had been arrested there, but said the Turkish episode was something else entirely.

The combination of filming under police scrutiny, repeated detention and a false accusation against the crew shaped the production and left the family fearful of surveillance, Khoshdast said.

Work, exile and a lost career

Khoshdast described maddening delays in obtaining work permits. The family must find employment under the table, he said, while police interest sustains a growing sense of paranoia.

Khoshdast said the family’s situation may illustrate what is happening to as many as half a million Iranians forced to flee their home country. He also said: “But for me, as an artist, even one family trapped in such circumstances is one family too many.”

Khoshdast said depression and homesickness can be particularly severe for Iranians in countries such as Turkey. They leave home without truly beginning a new life elsewhere, he said, and remain in limbo.

He said many eventually return home with nothing. Hamid and his son, however, can never return. Hamid struggles to carry on, but has no other choice.

Hamid’s inability to work openly, obtain a bank account or return home converts professional skill and family responsibility into a permanent problem of legal status.

Khoshdast said Hamid left a promising career in Iran once he realized that his technical skills were being used as part of the country’s missile system. Relaying an Iranian’s assessment, he said Hamid would now be wealthy, with an entire staff, if he had stayed and agreed to work on missile launchers. In Europe or the United States, he would have become an outstanding engineer.

Instead, Hamid lives a nomadic, precarious existence in Turkey because nobody supports him, Khoshdast said. Recently, Hamid told the director that he was not even permitted to have a bank account.

Keeping the camera at a distance

Khoshdast found that his subjects’ emotional burdens often became overwhelming. He chose to work with a cinematographer at all times so that he could remain close to them.

Working with a second person allowed Khoshdast to comfort participants between takes while preserving the concealed presence of the camera and the filmmaker’s direct access to their lives.

He said the family sometimes cried in his arms. He would hold and comfort them, then guide them in front of the camera. He made sure they neither saw the cinematographer nor felt his presence, and prepared the cinematographer to work in that way.

He developed the approach while making “Narrow Red Line,” his previous documentary about young people incarcerated, Khoshdast said. He worked with Morteza Poursamadi, whom he called the greatest cinematographer in the history of Iranian documentary cinema.

“Third Land” came about because Khoshdast and his wife spent all their savings on its production and shooting, he said. When filming ended, they had no money left. The security situation in Iran also prevented him from returning. Khoshdast now shares that legal status with the family whose struggles unfold onscreen.

What does the compressed timeline change for viewers?

The three-period structure makes three years of waiting feel like one sustained ordeal rather than a sequence of isolated hardships. It changes the viewer’s point of entry. Bureaucratic delay becomes a condition of every scene, not a backdrop for more dramatic events.

As “Third Land” continues in the Czech Joy section through Nov. 1, festival audiences will encounter a family whose work, movement and daily routines remain governed by legal limbo. Khoshdast’s insistence that one trapped family is already “one family too many” keeps that specific life from becoming a symbol.