Film Summary: “Rana, your father is gone forever. From now on, we will live together.” This news is conveyed to six-year-old Rana by her mother at the zoo. The night before, Rana had a dream about a deer that had escaped from the zoo, leaving its cage empty.
Nafiseh Zareh
Nafiseh Zareh, born in 1991 in Tehran, graduated with a degree in directing from Tehran University of Art. She began her career in cinema as an actress. Some of her successful films as an actress include Valderama (directed by Abbas Amini, 2016, selected for the Generation section of the Berlinale) and Disappearance (directed by Ali Asgari, 2017, selected for the Horizons section of Venice). After completing an advanced directing workshop with Asghar Farhadi, she made her first short film titled Lady. In 2021, she directed The Zoo in Tehran, which has had extensive participation in international festivals (including the Durban International Film Festival and winning the Best Film award at the BISFF International Festival, as well as participating in the International Women’s Film Festival KIN, among others). Subsequently, she worked as a screenwriter for the short films Whinny and Spasm, which were featured in several international festivals (including the Seoul Women’s Festival in South Korea, the Vancouver Festival in Canada, and the Rabat Festival in Morocco, etc.).
RedCut: How did you enter the field of filmmaking, and why did you choose the medium of cinema to tell your stories, knowing that working in this space is not easy and often crisis-ridden for women in a patriarchal society?
Nafiseh: I started in cinema by developing an interest in acting, and I worked as an actress for many years. When I was 25, changes occurred in my personal life, and I began to redefine myself. It was around that time that I made my first film titled Lady. I mention these changes because they are closely related to the toxic and patriarchal environment I lived and worked. Gradually, my identity shifted from being a passive actress in this space, and I wanted to be part of a story that I chose, rather than just performing roles and narratives that conflicted with my worldview. Shortly after making The Zoo, I permanently left acting and now define myself as a writer and filmmaker. I love the magic in cinema, and I chose this medium because it offers me the potential to immerse myself in the world and stories I wish to create and see—even if it’s just for the duration of a short film. Now that we’re talking about visualizing dreams, I must say that redefining womanhood within this patriarchal society is my most important motivation and passion for creating and storytelling.
RedCut: The presence of the girl and her mother in your film plays a significant role, creating a poetic space where a painful incident, such as the separation of the parents, is hidden beneath beautiful colors and forms. How did this contrast and the relationship between delicacy and violence, beauty and pain, manifest in your mind within this form?
Nafiseh: I remember that the keyword for narrating The Zoo was memory. I wanted the film to feel as though years later, this girl would recall the day she was separated from her father. This separation was painful for Rana and marked the beginning of her path to maturity. It’s likely that years later, she would remember that after that day, everything changed. This change is a blend of delicacy and violence, beauty and pain. The setting of the zoo itself embodies this contrast. The beautiful peacock behind the bars spreads its feathers. It’s both beautiful and melancholic, and I aimed to extend this metaphorical world beyond the zoo as well. Rana’s journey today involves walking through this zoo and understanding this very contradiction. Everything needs to be shown through her perspective on this particular day. The idea of painting all the children’s faces in the zoo with gouache, depicting animal faces on the children’s faces, also originated from this concept. There’s a scene where Rana, separated from the other children, watches them while they gaze at her within their group. This time, Rana becomes the subject of the other children’s gaze. The tiger roars and Rana imagines the smell of her father’s cigarette. She rides the paddle swans with her mother and gets stuck in the lake. Today, Rana recognizes this eternal blend of pain and beauty, and this permeates the form and images of the film as well.
RedCut: The child actors, especially the lead girl, performed remarkably and had a deep connection with the environment. How did you guide them in this context?
Nafiseh: My biggest concern regarding this film was the role of the little girl. Everyone who read the screenplay pointed out that the weight of the script rested on Rana’s shoulders, and for a child, this role is quite heavy. If she couldn’t handle it, the film wouldn’t succeed from the start. Four months before filming, I began searching with a very wide call for auditions to find the most suitable option for this role. I believe that choosing the right cast is seventy percent of the journey, and in this particular case, this choice was even more critical. My assistant and I, along with Sonia (the actress playing the mother), reviewed all the options and then moved forward by eliminating candidates. In the end, we were torn between Tarannom Ahangar (the actress playing Rana) and another little girl. The other option was much larger and plumper than Tarannom. When she hugged Sonia and wrapped her arms around Sonia’s neck, it felt as though she was choking her, and that quality fit the delicate mother character (Sonia Sanjari) very well. I liked that trait a lot, but Tarannom was the better actress. She was incredibly talented and clever, and of course, motivated. She hadn’t acted in a film before, and her face wasn’t recognized yet. Ultimately, we chose Tarannom. The rehearsals began at Sonia’s house, where the mother-daughter duo spent time together. They made pizza together and had fun, and I quietly whispered cues to Tarannom to be rebellious and interrogate her mother. She needed to be someone who didn’t just say “yes, of course,” and Tarannom naturally had the potential for this. I encouraged her, both in rehearsals and during filming. On shooting days, I tried to ensure that Tarannom was constantly praised and encouraged. I wanted her to be herself, full of confidence—not a prim and proper girl. This was what Tarannom’s role required, and Sonia, in contrast, needed to be calm and contained and struggle with this child. Throughout the pre-filming period, all rehearsals were designed around this dynamic. Sonia suggested setting an alarm clock during the shooting nights, and a few times she woke up at dawn to create dark circles under her eyes, making her insomnia evident. In the film, she also has a bad dream and tells her daughter that she can’t sleep well anymore. I tried to guide Tarannom more indirectly. For example, regarding the false story she tells the lost girl at the booth, this story was already in the screenplay, but during rehearsals, I would tell Tarannom a part of it each time, and she would draw it (and in the next session, I would share the rest of the story, and her drawing would become more complete). I wanted this lie to truly take shape in her imagination and be illustrated so that when she told it, it would be a lie she had already fantasized about.
RedCut: In the screenplay process, did you write the text based on the dependence on the chosen spaces? Because the role of space in the film was very significant, and the aesthetics of the film were realized more fully in the context of the location.
Nafiseh: The truth is that many of the spaces I had in the screenplay were never realized due to our financial limitations and the Eram Zoo. In the script, there were pink flamingos next to schoolgirls. There was a snake at the moment the mother exited the zoo, and things like that. I even visited the zoos in Mashhad and Karaj, but neither of these matched my imagination when I was writing the screenplay and needed reconstruction, and unfortunately, we couldn’t afford the costs. The essence of the zoo location and everything inherent in it has been part of the screenplay from the beginning, and the initial idea was based on these two images: a little girl feeding a deer in the zoo while hearing the news of her father leaving and a night where the girl sees her father smoking through the head of a deer.
RedCut: The relationship between the mother and her daughter is accompanied by a kind of concealment. What message do you convey to mothers regarding their children, who are meant to be our hope and future?
Nafiseh: It always amazes me how much children understand beyond what we can even imagine; they grasp their surroundings and the news around them. Parents worry about confronting children with the truth, and especially in this new generation, children sense lies or at least realize that not all of reality is being told to them. In the film The Zoo, there’s a mutual conspiracy between the mother and daughter. The mother has avoided speaking the truth directly and frankly until now because it has been a heavy confrontation for herself. On the other hand, Rana, as it has been easier for her mother, does not confront her father’s absence. She doesn’t stop asking questions, she imagines stories to find answers and insistently pulls her mother to the zoo with her lies. There’s something she won’t settle down until she understands, and that is the entirety of the truth. She speaks to her father on her toy phone and does not accept her mother’s denial and lies. There’s a scene by the lake where these two get stuck! Eventually, they sit opposite each other and are forced to face what lies ahead with strength. It’s painful for both—the speaker and listener! Up until this lake scene, we have no shot of the mother and daughter together, and only after this conversation does Rana finally sink into her mother’s embrace and find peace. After this dialogue, we finally see them in a two-shot. (Of course, at the end of the conversation scene, we see an extremely long shot of the mother and daughter with a lot of empty space surrounding them.) Now, both have reached greater peace and contrary to the mother’s expectations, even seeing the deer is no longer a wish for Rana. She understands more than her mother thinks. She knows she will now live alone with her mother, and the father who left without explanation no longer holds value for her. After learning the truth, she no longer wakes up to see the deer; she puts herself to sleep and watches the van carrying the deer leave through her half-closed eyelids.
RedCut: Do you have a new project in hand? If you are working on a new film, does the story once again focus on the relationship between mother and child?
Nafiseh: Yes, I am currently working on my new projects. After The Zoo, I’ve done more work as a screenwriter than as a filmmaker. It’s interesting for me to see how women and children with their diverse stories appear in my narratives, and every time I start writing a new story, I think to myself, how many stories about women, children, and animals are still untold? In this phase of my life, these subjects are the reason for my passion for storytelling. Maybe it will change later on.
