I Plant My Hand in the Garden (2026) by Hoda Taheri & Boris Hadžija

DE / RS / US | 83 min | Drama

➡️ Where to Watch: IT — MYmovies ONE / Biennale Cinema Channel, available September 4–7, 2026 during the Venice festival period. The current listing specifies September 4 at 16:30 through September 7 at 16:30.

Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, is pregnant and in love with Boris, a queer gay man from Serbia. Together they decide to marry and raise the child, imagining a family shaped by their own understanding of love rather than the conventional expectations attached to sexuality, marriage and parenthood. As the wedding approaches, however, bureaucracy, relatives and histories carried across borders begin complicating a future that initially seemed possible simply because they had chosen it together.

The emotional tension comes from the difference between inventing a new kind of family and actually living inside it. Hoda and Boris may reject traditional definitions, but neither arrives without cultural memories, family expectations or assumptions about what being a partner and parent should mean. The film therefore turns their unconventional relationship into something more universal: an examination of how difficult it is to create a new future without carrying pieces of the past into it.

➡️ Movie Insight: I Plant My Hand in the Garden treats family as something people can actively construct rather than simply inherit. Its central relationship challenges the assumption that romance, sexuality, marriage and parenthood must follow one predetermined pattern. The deeper conflict comes from discovering that reinventing family also requires confronting the identities and expectations already carried into it.

Family structures are changing faster than many of the institutions created to recognize them. Queer parenting, migration, chosen families, co-parenting and relationships that do not fit conventional romantic categories are increasingly visible realities, yet marriage law, citizenship, bureaucracy and cultural expectations still rely heavily on older definitions. I Plant My Hand in the Garden places that tension inside one intimate relationship rather than approaching it as an abstract social argument.

The filmmakers make that tension particularly complex because identity never exists in isolation. Hoda is navigating refugee experience, Iranian heritage, pregnancy and the possibility of German belonging, while Boris encounters expectations around queerness, masculinity and fatherhood. Taheri and Hadžija describe the film as fiction shaped by autobiographical experiences, using passports, marriage, nationality, gender and family to question the unstable boundary between identities that feel real and categories constructed by institutions.

➡️ Why It Matters: I Plant My Hand in the Garden recognizes that modern families can change faster than the institutions surrounding them. Personal freedom does not automatically remove bureaucracy, cultural inheritance or expectations about gender and parenthood. By placing those pressures inside one relationship, the film makes a large social transformation emotionally immediate.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden is especially suited to viewers drawn to intimate festival cinema where relationships reveal larger questions about society. The central premise contains migration, queer identity, marriage, pregnancy and cultural difference, but the film keeps those subjects connected to Hoda and Boris rather than separating them into individual social issues. Their attempt to create a family becomes the narrative thread through which all of those identities intersect.

The film should also appeal to audiences interested in cinema that deliberately destabilizes the boundary between fiction and autobiography. Taheri and Hadžija direct, write, produce and perform in the film, while members of their real families appear alongside them. The filmmakers explicitly describe this casting strategy as part of the movie’s fictional construction, using existing relationships and personal histories to create tension between lived experience and invented situations.

➡️ Viewing Recommendation: I Plant My Hand in the Garden is particularly suited to audiences interested in personal, queer and cross-cultural independent cinema. Its attraction comes less from conventional plot mechanics than from watching identities and relationships become increasingly difficult to categorize. The autobiographical foundation gives its fictional family story an unusual emotional intimacy.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden enters the international conversation through one of independent cinema’s most important discovery platforms. The film has been selected for the 2026 Giornate degli Autori Competition, held alongside the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, with its world premiere scheduled during the September festival. Official screenings include a September 2 press and industry presentation, a September 3 public screening with Q&A and a further September 12 public screening.

That visibility is strengthened by early awards positioning. Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija have received a 2026 Giornate degli Autori Award nomination, giving the film one nomination in the supplied awards record.  The film is additionally included among the titles competing for the 2026 Queer Lion, expanding its potential conversation among queer-film audiences during Venice.

➡️ Viral Potential: Venice gives an intimate first feature immediate access to an international audience of critics, programmers and independent-film viewers. Its unusual family structure and autobiographical-fiction approach create clear conversation points around queerness, migration, marriage and parenthood. Festival discovery could transform a highly personal story into a much broader cultural discussion about who gets to define family.

The film’s most distinctive idea may be the decision to make the boundary between real life and fiction deliberately unstable. Taheri and Hadžija play versions of Hoda and Boris while directing and writing the film themselves, and real family members enter the fictional construction around them. Rather than hiding those autobiographical foundations, the filmmakers make uncertainty about what is real part of the movie’s creative language.

That strategy is particularly appropriate for a film questioning identities that society often treats as fixed. Citizenship can change through paperwork, marriage can be legally defined without completely defining a relationship, and parenthood can exist beyond traditional expectations of sexuality and gender. By placing constructed cinema beside constructed social categories, the filmmakers make form and subject reinforce one another.

➡️ Cinema Insight: I Plant My Hand in the Garden stands out because autobiography is not simply background inspiration—it becomes part of the filmmaking method. Real relationships enter fictional situations while socially constructed identities are questioned alongside cinematic ones. The result turns the boundary between reality and performance into part of the movie’s argument about family itself.

A growing strand of contemporary independent cinema is becoming difficult to categorize cleanly as either fiction or documentary. Filmmakers increasingly perform versions of themselves, cast relatives, reconstruct experiences and transform autobiographical material into fictional narratives. This approach can preserve the freedom of scripted storytelling while retaining the emotional unpredictability and cultural specificity associated with documentary.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden fits that movement particularly strongly because its creators openly describe the film as fiction shaped by autobiographical experience. Taheri and Hadžija also arrive at the feature after developing a shared practice through shorts including Mother Prays All Day Long, As If Mother Cried That Night and Mother Is a Natural Sinner, with the latter completing a trilogy that premiered across consecutive years at Locarno. Their first feature expands that personal approach into a larger examination of migration, identity, queerness and alternative family structures.

➡️ Movie Trend: Autobiographical fiction is giving filmmakers a flexible language for exploring identities that resist simple categories. Real experience creates specificity while fictional construction allows filmmakers to question and reshape that experience. I Plant My Hand in the Garden demonstrates how personal life can become cinematic material without becoming conventional autobiography.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden has particularly strong potential among viewers who approach cinema through identity, relationships and cultural experience rather than conventional genre. Its Iranian, Serbian and Berlin contexts create a cross-cultural story, while the relationship between Hoda and Boris connects migration with queerness, pregnancy, marriage and changing ideas of parenthood.

Its festival positioning gives it another important audience dimension. Giornate degli Autori places the film within an auteur and discovery environment, while its inclusion in the Queer Lion competition creates a more specific point of entry for audiences following international queer cinema. The result is a film capable of moving between festival, LGBTQ+, migration and relationship-drama audiences without belonging exclusively to any one of them.

➡️ Audience Insight: I Plant My Hand in the Garden can connect audiences usually separated into different cinematic categories because its identities continually overlap. Queerness, migration, family and partnership are presented as interconnected parts of everyday life rather than individual themes. That intersection gives a culturally specific story much wider emotional reach.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden demonstrates how deeply personal cinema can be built through international collaboration without losing its specificity. The feature is produced by DFFB with Cruising, Naked and Mala as co-production companies, while Square Eyes handles world sales. Germany, Serbia and the United States form its official production identity, but its cultural landscape extends further through Hoda’s Iranian background and the Berlin environment in which the central relationship develops.

Its route through Venice shows why this production model matters. A first feature dealing with unconventional family structures, migration and queer identity can use festival recognition to enter an international marketplace before conventional distribution has been established. Temporary digital access through MYmovies ONE’s Biennale Cinema Channel adds another dimension, allowing part of the festival audience to encounter the film beyond physical screenings on the Lido.

➡️ Industry Insight: International independent cinema increasingly benefits from cultural specificity rather than needing to dilute it. Co-production, festival discovery, world sales and event-based digital access can collectively expand the reach of highly personal stories. I Plant My Hand in the Garden shows how a first feature can think internationally while remaining rooted in the filmmakers’ own identities and experiences.

Taheri and Hadžija build the film around instability: between fiction and autobiography, marriage and friendship, nationality and belonging, inherited family and chosen family. The creative strategy reflects the same question driving the story—whether identities that appear fixed can actually be reconstructed.

The screenplay begins with a clear decision: Hoda and Boris will marry and raise the child together. Rather than treating that decision as the conclusion of the story, the filmmakers make it the beginning, allowing bureaucracy, family expectations and inherited histories to expose how many unresolved questions remain underneath their imagined future.

Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija play the central characters while members of their actual families appear within the film. Because those performers bring existing gestures, histories and relationships into invented situations, performance becomes deliberately difficult to separate from lived experience—a creative tension the directors explicitly identify as central to their method.

Taheri and Hadžija met while studying directing at DFFB and subsequently developed a shared cinematic practice exploring migration, identity, queerness and alternative family structures. Their co-direction makes collaboration itself part of a film concerned with whether two people carrying different histories can construct a future together.

Vytautas Katkus’s cinematography accompanies a story where political and cultural questions remain rooted in bodies, homes, relatives and relationships rather than abstract discussion. The film’s visual context therefore supports its central interest in making concepts such as citizenship, marriage and family feel tangible through the people required to live inside those definitions.

Luka Barajević is credited with sound, while the official Venice materials do not list a separate composer. That production choice places greater emphasis on the film’s immediate sonic environment and the interactions among its characters rather than suggesting a heavily score-driven emotional architecture.

At 83 minutes, I Plant My Hand in the Garden remains concentrated around Hoda, Boris and the family structures surrounding them. The compact format allows questions about migration, bureaucracy, queerness and parenthood to emerge through the central relationship without requiring the film to become a broad survey of every social issue it touches.

➡️ Creative Insight: I Plant My Hand in the Garden uses autobiographical fiction to make uncertainty part of its cinematic language. Performance, family casting, co-direction and personal history continually destabilize the boundary between lived experience and invented narrative. The creative achievement lies in making that instability mirror the characters’ attempt to redefine identities society often presents as fixed.

The strongest companions to I Plant My Hand in the Garden are films that understand identity as something negotiated through relationships, borders and family expectations rather than something existing independently from them. Queerness, migration and cultural inheritance become especially powerful when characters must decide which parts of established social structures they want to preserve and which they need to reinvent.

Levan Akin’s Crossing follows retired Georgian teacher Lia to Istanbul as she searches for her missing transgender niece, gradually forming an unexpected connection with Evrim, a trans lawyer. Like I Plant My Hand in the Garden, geographical borders and queer identity become inseparable from larger questions about family, recognition and the possibility of creating meaningful connection outside familiar social structures.

➡️ Why It Connects: Both films treat identity through relationships rather than reducing it to a political category. Borders, family expectations and queer experience shape how characters understand belonging. Intimate connection becomes the route through which larger cultural structures are examined.

Saim Sadiq’s Joyland enters a Pakistani household organized around deeply established expectations of masculinity, marriage and family. The youngest son’s relationship with a transgender performer gradually exposes the distance between the identities people are expected to perform and the desires they actually experience.

➡️ Why It Connects: Both films question whether inherited definitions of marriage, gender and family can accommodate contemporary identities. Private relationships become places where cultural expectations are simultaneously reproduced and resisted. Family remains emotionally essential even when its traditional structure becomes impossible to accept unchanged.

➡️ Where to Watch: US | UK | DE

Across contemporary queer and migration cinema, Istanbul, Berlin and other transnational cities increasingly function as places where identity can be renegotiated outside the communities in which characters were originally defined. Films operating in this space connect physical movement with emotional transformation, allowing unfamiliar relationships to create alternative forms of belonging.

➡️ Why It Connects: The connection lies in characters building emotional structures across cultures rather than simply finding a new geographical home. Migration changes relationships as much as location. I Plant My Hand in the Garden extends that idea by asking whether a deliberately constructed family can become more meaningful than the definitions inherited from nationality, sexuality or tradition.

➡️ If You Liked Insight: Contemporary identity cinema is increasingly interested in belonging as something people actively construct rather than automatically inherit. Migration, queerness and family become intertwined because each forces characters to negotiate the difference between assigned identity and chosen life. I Plant My Hand in the Garden pushes that movement directly into one of society’s most established structures: the family.

I Plant My Hand in the Garden has a deceptively simple emotional foundation: Hoda and Boris want to build a future together. The complexity comes from discovering how many institutions, relatives, memories and identities are already present inside that decision. Instead of presenting chosen family as an uncomplicated alternative to tradition, the film examines the work required to create something genuinely new while carrying histories that cannot simply be abandoned.

Its autobiographical-fiction method makes that question more compelling. Taheri and Hadžija are not observing these subjects from a comfortable distance; they deliberately place their identities, creative partnership and real family relationships inside the fictional construction. Venice’s Giornate degli Autori platform gives that personal experiment significant international visibility and positions their debut feature within a wider movement toward cinema that treats lived experience as creative form.

➡️ Final Verdict: I Plant My Hand in the Garden is an intimate examination of family, identity and the difficult freedom of constructing life outside inherited expectations. Taheri and Hadžija turn their own proximity to the material into the film’s defining creative strength. Its central idea is both personal and expansive: choosing a different family structure is only the beginning of learning how to live inside it.

Contemporary cinema is becoming more interested in family as a structure that can be questioned, negotiated and reconstructed. Queer parenting, migration, chosen families and relationships outside conventional romantic models are giving filmmakers new ways to explore an institution that once appeared relatively fixed on screen. I Plant My Hand in the Garden captures that shift particularly well because Hoda and Boris do not simply reject traditional family—they attempt the much more complicated task of building an alternative while still carrying the emotional and cultural histories of the families that shaped them.

That direction also reflects a larger transformation in independent filmmaking. Autobiographical fiction allows filmmakers to approach politically significant questions through intimate experiences rather than explanatory narratives, while international co-production and festival networks can give those culturally specific stories global visibility. Taheri and Hadžija’s progression from shorts shown at Locarno and IFFR to a first feature competing at Giornate degli Autori demonstrates how a distinctive personal filmmaking language can develop into an internationally positioned body of work.

➡️ Final Insight: The future of family cinema is becoming less concerned with defining the correct family and more interested in understanding how people construct belonging for themselves. I Plant My Hand in the Garden turns queerness, migration and parenthood into interconnected parts of that transformation. Its broader lesson is that creating a new definition of family requires more than rejecting old rules—it requires discovering which relationships can grow after those rules are removed.