Moving Up

"Shahriyar is a garbage man in Kermanshah, Kurdistan. His everyday life: rubbish and trash. But his mind is elsewhere. His life is literature. There’s a book on a shelf or dropped on the ground? Shariar loses himself in reading at the risk of forgetting the world, his family and the demands of his job. His tastes are eclectic: he values Jack London as much as Shakespeare, Dostoievesky or Samuel Beckett, a photograph of the latter decorates the wall of his room. But reading isn’t enough; he also writes, obstinately, filling notebooks, journals, pages and scraps of paper with love stories populated with beautiful princesses with blue eyes decked out in brightly-colored costumes. Of this ardent vocation, he wanted to make a profession, but everything stands in the way of the advancement evoked by the title. A lack of understanding from his wife and his colleagues, a caustic criticism from aspiring
writers like him in a writing workshop, harassment by his neighbors and repeated rejections from publishers. The only audience ready to follow his flights of fancy, an auditory of domestic pigeons on his terrace; enclosed behind bars, they, too, are unable to reach the heavens. For his first film, Loghman Khaledi delivers the melancholy portrait of a man wrestling with his dreams. With neither condencension nor smug naivety, Khaledi makes his character the manifest ambassador of forbidden hopes, struggling against the dampening conformisim of a society where everyone is obliged to remain in his place."
(Nicolas Feodoroff, FID Marseille 2011)