Signals: How to Survive... screening - review - FROM TEHRAN TO HEAVEN by Abolfazl Saffary

The titular juxtaposition is clear. Heaven in the film is not just a destination, but it is any other place aside from the nightmarish, chaotic and disintegrated city of Tehran, where madness unfolds and unravels with such normality as to make it seem like a terrestrial version of hell.

Filmmaker Saffary initially disguises the film like a Hitchcockian thriller, built around a chase structure, race against time narrative, suspense and chills. The story of Tehran to Heaven is that of a pregnant woman in a desperate search for her husband, who has mysteriously gone leaving only a cryptic note where he stated that he was going to heaven. The search is more out of necessity then anything else, as his disappearance has directly put her own like and the life of her child in danger and she is no longer safe in her own household.

However, it doesn’t take long for Saffary to reveal a certain curious and clever approach to the story, particularly in its relation to its cultural and geographical setting. From start to finish, we are exposed to and bombarded with general images of everyday madness that would have, for example, driven Michael Douglas in Falling Down berserk. Elevators perennially broken in the house, senseless beatings taking place in random street corners and indelible signs of poverty such as tens of people gathering around a car at a red light begging for change.

This decadence is not revealed in the more commonly used melodramatic and dark approach, but rather with a fresh and original contrast of drama and satire. Exaggeration is a big asset in the film, and indeed makes From Tehran to Heaven feel like a post-apocalyptic feature, often even a sci-fi that is not far from painting the same outlandish vision of Cronenberg’s Total Recall.

Eventually, the film takes the chase to the desert, that seems to surround the city of Tehran like a sea of sand and isolate it from the rest of the world. Here, Saffary indulges into clever imagery and abstract representation. Yet, the story is always unfolding at a steady rhythm, so despite the somewhat experimental flirtations, the film is constantly entertaining and at around an hour and fifteen minutes in length, never boring.

In a way, with Tehran to Heaven, we can say that Saffary has successfully exploited a conventional genre in a way that has rarely worked so well. At the same time, his comments on Iranian society are quite powerful and brave, as they conceal a lot of worrying truth about the insanity being treated as normality in the streets of Tehran. But, alas, there is a positive message to be read in the woman’s pregnancy and a hope for the future generation that is never obviously hinted at, but is always present and underlines the film’s darkest and most hopeless of moments.