Director Sara Dolatabadi captured the time she spent with her parents in the family garden on the outskirts of Tehran. On the surface, the film appears to be a family drama, but the fact that Sara’s father is Mahmoud Dolatabadi, the most renowned novelist in Iran, infuses the film with an entirely different texture and atmosphere. Having lived through poverty, imprisonment, revolution, war, political oppression, and censorship in Iran, Mahmoud has a remarkable ability to create a completely fictional world, which was also passed down to his daughter, Sara. An Owl, A Garden & The Writer is a bold and mesmerizing documentary that blurs the boundary between reality and imagination by interlacing dreams, memories, fiction, and letters with the memories she share with her parents. It is a uniquely poetic record of a family’s history and an intimate and imaginative portrait of a great writer/father by his visual artist director/daughter. (KANG Sowon)