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 future built on their own terms. As they prepare for the wedding and enter more deeply into each other’s worlds, their relationship is unsettled by bureaucracy, family expectations and histories neither of them can leave behind. Surrounded by relatives, memories and inherited ideas of love and parenthood, Hoda and Boris begin to question the roles they are about to take on. What starts as a plan to become a family gradually opens into a more intimate and uncertain question: can they reinvent what it means to be a couple without losing what brought them together?
I Plant My Hand in the Garden
a film by
Boris Hadžija & Hoda Taheri
Biography
Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija are Berlin-based filmmakers from Iran and Serbia/Montenegro, whose work explores migration, identity, queerness and alternative forms of family through genre-crossing storytelling. They met while studying directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) and have since developed a shared cinematic practice. Together, they created the short film trilogy Mother Prays All Day Long (2022) , As If Mother Cried That Night (2023), and Mother Is a Natural Sinner (2024), which premiered at Locarno. Yugotransport (2023) premiered at IFFR. Their debut feature I Plant My Hand in the Garden (2026) premiered at the Venice Film Festival (Giornate degli Autori).
Filmography
I Plant My Hand in the Garden / 2026 / feature / fiction
Mother is a Natural Sinner / 2024 / short/ fiction
As If Mother Cried That Night / 2023 / short/ fiction
Yugotransport – We are all on the same Bus / 2023 / short/ fiction
Mother Prays All Day Long / 2022 / short/ fiction
