BELGRADE: I Plant My Hand in the Garden, the first time feature for directors Boris Hadžija, from Serbia, and Hoda Taher, from Iran, will have its world premiere in the competition programme Venice Days / Giornate degli Autori at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The film is a coproduction between Germany, Serbia, and the USA.
Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, is pregnant and in love with Boris, a queer gay man from Serbia. Together, they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a future built on their own terms. As they prepare for the wedding and enter more deeply into each other’s worlds, their relationship is seriously tested by all the red tape and their families’ expectations and histories that neither of them can leave behind. Surrounded by relatives, memories and inherited ideas of love and parenthood, Hoda and Boris begin to question the roles they are about to take on. What starts as a plan to become a family gradually turns into a more intimate and uncertain question: can they reinvent what it means to be a couple without losing what brought them together?
“The film is fiction, shaped by autobiographical experiences. In our work, fiction is never something the characters surrender to. On the contrary, it is something that we try to dismantle. Even the possibility of a future, like the imagined life of a child, is treated as material fiction, something that can be touched, rejected, or silenced. Casting members of our real families is part of this fictional construction: their existing relationships, gestures and personal histories bring a particular tension to the performances, while allowing us to communicate with them indirectly, through invented characters and situations. The film is interested in the unstable boundary between what appears real and what is constructed. A passport is a physical object, yet the identity it grants is political and imagined. Marriage may be legally recognised while remaining difficult to define. A queer man is measured against expectations of masculinity and fatherhood; a refugee becomes German on paper; belief, nationality, gender and family are constantly shaped by institutions, traditions and personal desires,” Boris Hadžija and Hoda Taheri said exclusively for FNE.
The key roles are played by the authors themselves, along with members of their respective families: Branko Hadžija, Igor Hadžija, Jahandoht Taheri, and Hosna Taheri.
I Plant My Hand in the Garden is a coproduction between Germany’s DFFB, Germany’s Crusing, Serbia’s Naked and the US Mala Production, with support from Creative Europe MEDIA. The producers are Maximilian Feldkamp, Čarna Vučinić, Ena Bajraktarević, Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija, while the coproducer is Tyler Hill.
The film was mainly shot in Serbia (two thirds in Serbia and one third in Germany) on locations in and around Sremski Karlovci, Novi Sad, Belgrade and Berlin during the course of January and February 2026.
The Serbian premiere will take place at the FAF – Auteur Film Festival in Belgrade in the autumn of 2026.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival will be held 2 – 12 September 2026.
Production Information:
Producer:
DFFB (Germany)
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Coproducers:
Crusing (Germany)
Naked (Serbia)
Mala Production (USA)
Credits:
Directors: Boris Hadžija, Hoda Taheri
Scriptwriters: Boris Hadžija, Hoda Taheri
DoP: Vytautas Katkus
Editor: Boris Hadžija
Production designer: Michael Schindlmeier
Sound designer: Luka Barajević
Costumes: Anna-Maria Scharf
Cast: Boris Hadžija, Hoda Taheri, Branko Hadžija, Igor Hadžija, Jahandoht Taheri, Hosna Taheri
