Absence | Naboodan (2021)
Absence is a mystical thriller

By Absence Film


The Iranian cinema has never had a chance to talk about those who had to escape from the country following the 1953 military coup and the fall of Dr. Mossadegh’s government in Iran..

No one can deny the fact that these people have greatly and strangely influenced the country’s cultural, political and social atmosphere throughout the following years until today.

In this respect, Absence will be an attempt to shed light on a forgotten corner where the histories of Iran and the former Czechoslovakia meet.

An Iranian man, while investigating into his father's youth in Prague, finds himself in the shoes of a third man who is almost dead and happens to be his half-brother.



Rouzbeh arrives in Prague, away from his troubled family life in Tehran, and drowns himself instead in a research about his father’s past as a communist expatriate in the former Czechoslovakia. Upon visiting the flat where his father used to live 50 years ago, he’s stopped by the police investigating a recent accident. The resident of the flat (Vladimir) has fallen from the window and his father’s name is identical to Rouzbeh’s. This can be no accident and he must accept that Vladimir is his own half brother. As he gets closer to the soul of Vladimir and discovers the hidden corners of his life, he learns a shocking fact about his father’s past, in total contrast to the hero he always admired. This directs him to a course of events identical to the one which brought Vladimir to his fall from the window.

Director's Note

“.... the soul is but a manner of being -- not a constant state -- .... any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden.”
- Vladimir Nabokov “The real life of Sebastian Knight”

I have always been enchanted by stories in which someone is trying to understand someone else’s predicaments, the situation which brought about his misery and the undulations which directed him to a point of no return. The protagonist is gradually stripped empty of all his own personal pursuits and is instead prepared, like an empty container, to embrace those of another. It would be even more challenging if the second party is absent and the entire clue is what has remained of his life.

Absence will be a mystical thriller of that sort.



From another point of view, the Iranian cinema has never had a chance to talk about those who had to escape from the country following the 1953 military coup and the fall of Dr. Mossadegh’s government in Iran.

My personal attachment to the life of Iranian expatriates of that era and their adventures comes from one particular case. A friend of my father’s, who after the coup fled to the former Czechoslovakia, spent many years living in Prague and then upon the Islamic revolution in Iran left his Czech family and returned to Iran where he thought he could join his old comrades and pursue his old ideals but shortly after his arrival he was jailed and was never able to join his family again. Whether they served or betrayed their country is not to be decided here but no one can deny the fact that these people have greatly and strangely influenced the country’s cultural, political and social atmosphere throughout the following years until today.

In this respect, Absence will be an attempt to shed light on a forgotten corner where the histories of Iran and the former Czechoslovakia meet. --Ali Mosaffa