Born in Evin
The Silence of Origins - Documentry review by Kayvan Kaboli
A girl descends with a parachute into a barren and unfamiliar land. After her first steps and glances around, she wants to know where she is. Her curiosity in that strange land, with its soil and brush into which she has been cast, stirs her spirit into searching. Soon she realizes that to understand where she is, she must first know where she came from.
Isn’t this the same question that humanity asks after its first encounter with existence in this world?
Where am I, and from where have I entered this unknown realm?
And this human being, fallen into a land of wonders, in search of a fitting answer, constantly turns toward a higher force, an all-knowing God in their imagination, to ask.
Maryam Zaree’s God is her mother. But just as God does not speak plainly or directly to humankind, Maryam’s mother also refuses to answer. Why indeed? Why is the mother unwilling, in any way, to speak of the past and of what befell them?
If humankind cannot see God, Maryam has her mother before her. A mother who talks with her about everything, who touches her, breathes her in. A mother who appears successful in German society and sacrifices for her daughter, just as she once gave birth to Maryam while imprisoned. Yet now, faced with Maryam’s most essential need—to emerge from the darkness—this mother remains trapped in deadly silence. Not even a faint glimmer of light does she cast upon her daughter’s shadowed thoughts.
Despairing of hearing answers from her mother, but hopeful of finding them elsewhere, Maryam sets off into the darkness with a camera in her hand and a candle that casts a small circle of light. She must embark on this journey—perhaps she may find others who, if not able to give her the whole story or all the answers, can at least offer fragments of the past, fragments she might piece together to form a clearer image of her origin.
Yet what others offer to this wandering soul only deepens her confusion. One asks,
What are you looking for?
Another directs her toward peace in looking elsewhere. But Maryam knows what she is searching for—even if, in spite of her fluency in four languages, she cannot quite articulate it to her listeners. She seeks something to fill the hole within her—the void left by those adults, those like her mother, who were once imprisoned. But those adults do not recognize the nature of the void inside Maryam.
This time, in her search, Maryam turns to children like herself, hoping through dialogue with them to find a key that might help her decode her own being. To Maryam, if these children also carry inner voids—and they do—then surely those voids must be of the same nature as her own, like the emptiness she bears within.
But these encounters do not help her either. Conversations with those who were yesterday’s imprisoned children and today’s accomplished professionals only weigh her mind down with contradictions. She sought others whose burdens matched her own. Yet a void is an absence, a nothingness—and how can something that does not exist share substance with another’s?
It is at this point—after meeting the last of the former imprisoned children—that Maryam leaps into water, transforming into a fetus in her mother’s womb, touching the past with the faintest connection. This experience makes her realize that her earlier questions were not precise, not even meaningful to herself. No wonder others had no answers for her. But the greater question remains: had her questions been precise from the beginning, could those others have illuminated her darkness? Certainly not.
And so Maryam turns to the one she believes to be the all-knowing: her God. She turns to her mother. All the answers must lie with her—and now she must respond. There is no other way…
