Our main challenge in the filmmaking process was how to combine the lived experiences and psychoanalytic facts mentioned in Freud's “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” into theatrical content so that the audience communicate with the subject of the psychoanalysis in question while following the film to the end.
The term, “Repetition compulsion”, which Freud refers to in his article with an example called “Fort-Da game”, after passing through the filter of our minds, became the image of a girl sitting on the phone and at some point, in the conversation reaches the limit of her feelings, voluntarily finding herself in a situation where she is under the pressure of her major character and throws the marbles.
"Fort!" and "Da!" are exclamations that Sigmond Freud heard his grandson Ernst utter while playing. This pair of German words—meaning "Gone!" and "There!"—has become shorthand for repetition in early childhood, and for the primary processes that such behavior mobilizes.
Short Synopsis: Darya fixates on her friend Samin's beauty at a party, continuously comparing it to her own perceived ugliness. When Samin leaves due to discomfort, news of her accident surfaces, revealing that most of her teeth are broken.
The film was shot in four sessions with a relatively long interval (which of course was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic conditions in our procedures), and each time after each session, without limiting ourselves to a framework, a new idea entered the script again. It seems that after each session, we experienced what visual trick or dialogue we could use in the next session to further engage the audience with our original idea.
Our subconscious led us to think that the image of the girl throwing marbles (Darya) was like the moment when the boy throws his lovely toys in Freud's descriptions in his psychoanalytic article.
At one point we expanded Freud's theory to a neuroscientific challenge by starting a scene with the camera entering Darya’s dark pupil followed by an audio-visual sequence. Perhaps, the initial spark for script design came from a lived experience and the study of an article alongside, but gradually, with the concurrence of directors, actors, and cinematographers the film found its way to the story.
After editing several versions and getting feedback from several groups of audiences, we finally reached the most comprehensible final version, which cannot be said to be the exact original idea or the same case as Freud's article. But it can be said with certainty that after talking to the actor about the script, the impact of that initial idea was communicated to the actor and the actor influenced us. Thus the film went beyond only remaking an article and the main character of the film (Darya) found herself as a unique case. Finally, all we tried to do was to hold the audience's hand, entertain them along the way with visual treats and a not-so-classic narrative, and bring them to the background (the conversation between Darya and Samin).
