Interview: Ali Asgari – Divine Comedy

Sometimes, in a landscape where censorship and endless approvals are the norm, following your creative instincts means thinking differently and finding ways to work outside the system just to remain part of it. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival this year, known for intimate, socially attuned dramas that explore censorship, personal freedom, and the everyday pressures faced by ordinary people we got to revisit with Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari. Terrestrial Verses interrogates the constraints placed on artists and citizens in Iran, and Divine Comedy continues this trajectory by following a forty-year-old director whose entire body of work has been blocked from public release, prompting him and his producer to stage an illicit screening. It’s a blend of long static shots, and satirical portraits of bureaucratic absurdity that make this meta portrait all the more delish. At the 2025 Doha Film Festival I had the chance to chat with Ali Asgari about the clever use of embedding (once again) his niece Sadaf in his film, the idea of featuring Bahram and Bahman Ark in the film’s fabric and the tone and visual style explored here.