Milad Alami’s debut feature tells the story of 30-something Esmail (an electrifying Ardalan Esmaili), an Iranian living in Denmark. Esmail works for a moving company; his heart’s desire is to stay in the country, but to do so he has to meet a Danish girl and marry her. He becomes a master in the art of flirting and picking up women, hoping that one of the nights he spends at an elegant bar he’ll run into his future wife. Eventually he meets a young woman who’s also of Iranian origin and gradually falls for her, but a person from his past fatefully shows up, complicating his plans. Alami shows the Western world through the eyes of an immigrant from the East, brutally exposing the class and racial prejudices that his character has to face, but he avoids simplistic conclusions and moralizing. Nor does he condemn Esmail’s attitude: he makes us realize that for working-class people from different cultural and political realities sometimes deception is the only means to survive.
Milad Alami
Ingeborg Topsøe, Milad Alami
Sophia Olsson
Martin Dirkov
Ardalan Esmaili, Lars Brygmann, Susan Taslini, Soho Rezanejad, Morten Hee Andersen