Hoda and Boris are in love and are expecting a child. So, they decide to marry and officially form a family together. But as the wedding draws nearer, it starts to dawn on them that becoming a family may require them to reinvent what it means to be a couple.
After all, Hoda is an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, and Boris is a queer man from Serbia. They are the protagonists of I Plant My Hand in the Garden from co-writers and co-directors who share – no coincidence, you’ll see! – their first names: Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija. The film, marking the debut feature-length movie for the duo, will get its world premiere in the competition of Venice Days, or Giornate degli Autori, the independent section within the Venice Film Festival promoted by the Italian filmmaker associations Anac and 100autori.
“Together, they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a future built on their own terms,” reads a synopsis for I Plant My Hand in the Garden. “As they prepare for the wedding and enter more deeply into each other’s worlds, their relationship is unsettled by bureaucracy, family expectations and histories 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 opens into a more intimate and uncertain question: can they reinvent what it means to be a couple without losing what brought them together?”
Taheri and Hadžija star in the movie, along with Branka Hadžija, Jahandokht Taheri and Hadi Khanjanpour. The cinematography comes courtesy of Lithuanian camera wiz Vytautas Katkus.
Boris Hadžija also handled editing.
The 2026 edition of the Venice Days competition takes place Sept. 2-12, with I Plant My Hand in the Garden debuting on Sept. 3. The filmmaking duo previously worked together on the short film trilogy Mother Prays All Day Long (2022), As If Mother Cried That Night(2023), and Mother Is a Natural Sinner (2024), which all premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. Their short Yugotransport – We Are All on the Same Bus (2023) premiered at Rotterdam.
“I Plant My Hand in the Garden grows out of the same questions that have shaped our earlier films: how identity, family and belonging are formed, contested and reinvented,” Taheri and Hadžija share about their new film. “By placing a queer Serbian man and an Iranian refugee with a German passport at the center of a fictional marriage, we explore how institutions, such as marriage, nationality and gender, assign roles that feel both real and constructed. Casting members of our own families intensifies this tension, blurring the line between autobiography and invention.”
They conclude: “We are less interested in defining what a ‘real’ family or relationship is than in asking what might emerge when we step outside inherited forms. The title suggests claiming ground, but for us, planting a hand is about testing whether something unfamiliar can take root at all.”
I Plant My Hand in the Garden is produced by Maximilian Feldkamp for DFFB in Germany, with co-production by Taheri and Hadžija’s Cruising in Germany, Čarna Vučinić and Ena Bajraktarević for Naked in Serbia, and Tyler Hill for Mala Productions LLC in the U.S. Square Eyes is handling world sales.
THR can exclusively premiere a trailer for the movie. We won’t spoil much beyond saying: get ready for wedding conversations, music, a lost condom – and talk of cake, among other things. Watch the exclusive trailer for I Plant My Hand in the Garden right here.
