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Logline

In Tehran’s underground parkour scene, Asal and Atousa risk everything to keep moving. Traversing rooftops, defying gravity, choosing motion over silence.

Synopsis

The wind shifts without warning. Laundry lines whip against satellite dishes. Five stories down, a motorbike backfires.

Atousa feels the grit of the rooftop under her palms. She wipes them on her pants. The gap between buildings is less than two meters. It looks wider. She doesn’t look at the gap. She looks at a crack in the concrete near her shoe and presses the toe of her sneaker into it, giving her mind something smaller than the gap to focus on. The wind lifts the edge of her headscarf and she tucks it back under her chin without thinking.

Across from her on the opposite rooftop, Asal doesn’t move. She knows better than to count down. You don’t jump on three. You jump when your body knows to. Atousa rolls her shoulders. Shakes out her hands. She starts forward, stops, backs up again. This time she runs all the way through. For a second there is only air. Then, her foot hits the opposite ledge, too close to the edge. Her body pitches forward. Asal grabs the back of her shirt and pulls. They collapse onto the roof together, breathless, laughing too loudly. This is how their friendship is built.

Asal is twenty-three. She trains six days a week, mapping Tehran through rooftops, parking structures, unfinished buildings. Parkour pulled her out of a depression at fifteen. It gave her rules when everything else felt stalled. Her mother tells her to be careful. Careful would mean staying off the roof. Atousa is twenty-one. She finds parkour on her phone late at night, algorithms feeding her girls who fly between buildings. She messages Asal. They meet on a rooftop like this one.

They train with an underground troupe scattered across the city. Young men and women moving through gyms that change names, parks at dawn before they get crowded, foothills above the smog line. They are preparing for a national competition. Registration requires ID numbers, official approval, exposure. Women competing in a sport like this crosses lines that aren’t supposed to be crossed. Signing up could shut the door on everything they and their families have built.

What they are building is harder to measure: a way of moving through the city that does not ask permission.

In parkour, every jump has a pause inside it, a fraction of a second where doubt floods in. If you hesitate, you fall. The film lives there, in the fight against that instinct. In the decision to go anyway. They train. They leap. They never move backwards.

Meet the Filmmakers

Alexandra Tahereh Kaucher — Director and Producer
Alexandra Tahereh Kaucher was born in 1989 – daughter of John Kaucher, an ex-pat American painter and Elham Khatibi, an ex-pat Iranian contrarian who met in Paris.

She studied European and Mediterranean studies at NYU. This segued into a career of Production Design and Costume Design for film. She has designed projects in India, Morocco, South Africa, Europe, and all across the US. Her recent Production Design work includes To Dust starring Matthew Broderick and Géza Röhrig, which won the audience award at the Tribeca film festival in New York.

She now directs and produces with her partner and collaborator on various short-form pieces, music videos, and art projects under the moniker Hiss. She has directed a dozen short form pieces for BBC storyworks in over various countries in multiple languages in addition to making various short video art pieces. Alexandra made Ad age’s The List Generation Next 2022 and the Commercial Director’s Diversity Program 2022.

Her directorial works have premiered at Cannes AVIFF, Milano Fashion Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Aesthetica, Swedenborg film festival, and The Awareness Festival promoting sustainable and green futures. Her work has been published on Nowness, BOOOOOOOOM, Re/ Make, and Alpine Modern.

Her experimental video collage works Unrest in Iran, Utera, Haft Sin, & How to Cut a Pomegranate have shown at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, The Holy Art Gallery, The New House Art Space & The Kato Wong gallery in London.

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Contact

For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.