Mani Haghighi’s documentary, I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (2026), opens with a diverse group of stone-faced archivists in a beautiful, jewel-toned room lined with books and ephemera. They suit up in masks and gloves to root through garbage bags filled with photo albums, broken pottery, and other artifacts of unknown provenance, caked in dirt and debris. However, as the Iranian director’s voice-over narration explains, “This film wasn’t meant to begin this way.” Authorities confiscated the footage Haghighi shot for the original opening, “a girl standing on a foggy mountain road, searching for a phone signal,” when they raided the film crew’s hotel room in Tabriz. Their crime was depicting a woman without a headscarf.
I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies is a document of documentation — of discovery, preservation, and remembrance. Haghighi focuses on Iranian artist Nasser Bakhshi and his wife, Roghayeh Najdi, and their monumental archive of cultural history, from the pre-Islamic era to the Iranian Revolution and into today, arranged in their home. Bakhshi and Najdi are charming, eccentrically stylish, and in love. They are beloved by the Persian rug dealers whom Haghighi interviews about the couple’s intense shopping habit. Haghighi asks aloud whether Bakhshi is a hoarder, and the artist responds, “I collect consciously, methodically, and logically … I’m aware of my instinct.”
