Higher Than Acidic Clouds (2025) ‘Visions du Réel’ Movie Review: Ali Asgari’s Plaintive, Searching Doc on Artistic Repression and Resistance

Ali Asgari’s “Higher than Acidic Clouds” opens in closed spaces with an eye to the boundless. Asgari’s voice can’t be contained, straitened, exploding into affiliations with other faraway places, Iceland and Italy, while home in Tehran feels like a ‘stranger’. This essay documentary transpires in the shadow of Asgari’s house arrest in 2023. It ensued on the heels of his return home from Cannes, where he presented his film “Terrestrial Verses.” Suddenly, he found himself severed from the world as the government banned his traveling and raided his house, digging for material to furnish baseless allegations.

In haunting monochrome captured by DP Arman Fayaz, a portrait of captivity emerges, one that however pushes beyond and surges across any spatial confine. Cooped up in his apartment, as he’s interrogated, he endures, his mind drifting elsewhere, dipping into memories of his mother, his childhood when he used to sleepwalk. The film imbibes his desire to fly, spanning Tehran from above.

For all the circumscribing put on Asgari, his imagination, the ‘inner vault’ of his memories, and his act of observing are impenetrable. It’s the final frontier that cannot be broken into even as government officials ransack his apartment, plough to pull up anything seditious. “Your hands can’t grasp my imagination”, he asserts. How he can be taken into custody is what colours every aspect of authorities and their attitude to him. Meanwhile, a looming lone polluted cloud stands witness, evoking the sheer absurdity of the clampdown.

He’s under siege as are artists, intellectuals, any dissenter who dare to articulate, express discomfort with the regime’s ways. To express with honesty and conviction alone becomes reason enough for apprehension, detention—a suspicious gaze marooning the person forever. Can release, escape be found ever? Asgari laments not being able to show his films to the women they are meant for.

Theatrical permissions are always denied, so he takes it on himself to screen his film. In this film, boundaries between the real, dreamlike, and the designed melt away in soft, poetic ways, framed against a bleak, forbidding visual schema. Noting that the shifting expressions of the women watching are the most captivating, he records their responses, too. While some express reservations and are surprised he made the film, many tell him how they related with his characters’ constricted reality, their heavily overseen lives dictated by fathers, men, and community.

Higher Than Acidic Clouds (2025) — A still from “Higher Than Acidic Clouds” (2025)

“Higher than Acidic Clouds” also ponders change and loss geographically; the city of Tehran has seen marked changes. The mountains have dipped out of view. Now, there’s just a bramble of concrete high-rises, a cold tangle of towers- impersonal, inhospitable, deeply removed. Where are the lanes? Landscapes that defined Asgari’s childhood have disappeared or shifted so dramatically that Tehran itself seems alien. When home begins to feel unfamiliar, unreliable, and distant, where do you turn? Everything in the city seems shrouded in a ‘dark gray’; it’s what Fayaz focalizes with bracing starkness, plumbing the hollow within. Instead, there’s a peculiar kinship felt with the landscapes of Iceland, a space of anchorage Italy offers in all its legible cultural repository.

Starting with artistic repression, “Higher than Acidic Clouds” branches off into a weary but resolute contemplation on memory, identity, and the nature of home. But there’s no ambiguity about its statements. Only refusal holds up, girdled in the very act of survival. If you lose that, what’s left? Asgari takes you on a charmed, drifting tour of his memories, temporally rippling and those propping up their own narrative.

Importantly, the film never caves into a spirit of defeat and anguished abandonment despite its acute, insistent recognition of reckoning with loss and rupture. Instead, Asgari’s intonation of not toeing the line can’t be clearer and more cutting. As effortlessly orchestrated as profoundly self-reflexive, “Higher than Acidic Clouds” is a vital, powerful rebuttal by an artist who can’t be affixed within regulating boundaries.