Nello studio di un noto regista, alcune attrici sostengono un provino per il ruolo di Shahrazād in “Le mille e una notte”. Ma le donne si rendono gradualmente conto che il regista ha in mente qualcosa di più del semplice casting per il ruolo principale.

1001 Frames begins in an audition room—a space suspended between hope and dread. Traditionally, it is a place where dreams take shape, where transformation feels possible. But in this film, that room becomes charged with another meaning: it is a stage where power and vulnerability meet, where silence has long been enforced, and where stories buried in shadows demand to be told.

The inspiration for this film comes from both proximity and distance. I carry with me the memories of growing up in Iran, where women live under the constant weight of imposed restrictions. I also carry the stories of friends whose lives in cinema were marked not by discovery, but by exploitation and betrayal. These fragments, though scattered across different worlds, are bound by a shared truth: women’s voices are too often interrupted, dismissed, or taken from them entirely.

In 1001 Nights, Scheherazade survives by weaving stories night after night, transforming her captivity into a space of creation. In 1001 Frames, survival is not the act of a single woman but the gathering of many voices, overlapping and colliding, each pushing against erasure. The film becomes a chorus, a collective telling that refuses silence.

I chose to blur the line between documentary and fiction, allowing real testimonies to seep into a constructed narrative. The camera is not a passive witness but an uneasy participant, placing the audience in the position of both voyeur and confidant. This unsettling intimacy asks us to question not only what we see, but how we see.

Horror here does not arrive with monsters or ghosts; it emerges from what is real. It is in the hesitation before speaking, the invisible weight pressing down on bodies, the unspoken demand for obedience. The atmosphere of dread is not a fantasy, but a mirror of lived experience.

Yet within this darkness lies resilience. The women in this film do not simply recount their pain—they reshape it into testimony, into art, into defiance. The stories are fractured, but together they form a pattern, a tapestry that gestures toward liberation.

For me, 1001 Frames is less about exposing a wound than about holding space for the act of storytelling itself—an act that can resist, transform, and endure. It is an invitation to listen differently, to sit with discomfort, and to recognize that even in the most suffocating rooms, imagination can still carve a way toward freedom.