About the Story
The story begins with a simple encounter: the narrator comes across an elderly woman who has fallen in the street and asks for help. What initially appears to be an ordinary accident gradually becomes a gateway into the narrator’s past, where memories of love, loss, violence, imprisonment, childhood, and fear become intertwined.
At its core, the story explores repetition and the impossibility of erasing memory. The elderly woman’s fall, the narrator’s childhood memory of his mother falling, and the memory of his former lover falling at the same bend in the road echo one another across different moments of his life. The past seems to reproduce itself in new forms, even after many years have passed. His experience of imprisonment and enforced solitude further shapes his relationship with memory, identity, and the passage of time.
Ultimately, the story asks whether forgetting could free us from the repetition of pain. If it were ever possible to permanently erase memories, would our suffering disappear with them—or would we also lose the very experiences that make us capable of remembering, understanding, and telling stories?
About the Author
Nasser Mansourafshari, known professionally as Nasser Pooyesh, is an Iranian filmmaker, writer, and photographer with more than three decades of experience in independent cinema. Working as a writer, director, and producer, he co-wrote the screenplay Women Plus Men with the late Abbas Kiarostami, a collaboration rooted in the tradition of Iranian art cinema.
His documentary feature The Burnt City has been screened at international film festivals. He is also a published Persian-language author, with books including It’s Only One Eye (2023) and Anti-Gallows Love and Anti-Prison Lovemaking (Arzan Publications, Sweden, 2025). His forthcoming short-story collection is titled The Direction of the Cat’s Gaze. His photography has been exhibited in Iran and internationally, and he received an Honorary Diploma from the European Modern Arts Expo in 2023. His photographs are also collected in My Resemblance to Myself (Lulu, USA, 2025).
He is currently developing his next feature film, continuing a career devoted to human-centered, independent storytelling from Iran.