Vital

VITAL began with a memory from my childhood in Iran. I remember learning that a family friend was trying to buy a kidney for his mother. At that age, I couldn’t fully understand what it meant, but the idea that an organ could become part of a financial transaction to save someone you love stayed with me.

Iran is the only country in the world where the sale of organs—more specifically kidneys—is legal, while in the United States, organ sales are prohibited and tens of thousands of people remain on transplant waiting lists. Having spent much of my life between Iran and North America, I became fascinated by how these two very different systems confront the same fundamental problem: there are more people in need of organs than there are organs available. I wanted VITAL to explore the difficult moral choices that emerge when love, survival, economics, and scarcity collide.

The organ trade in VITAL also became a metaphor for my complicated relationship with Iran. Although I left the country years ago, I continue to “harvest” its memories, contradictions, and stories for my filmmaking. Iran is no longer where I live, but it remains deeply connected to how I see the world, the stories I’m drawn to, and the filmmaker I have become.

There are no heroes or villains in this story, only people trying to protect the ones they love within circumstances that test the limits of what they believe is right. Through these two parents, I wanted to explore how socioeconomic realities can shape our moral choices, and how differently any of us might act when the life of someone we love is at stake.