A football team coach dies—but he is no ordinary man, leaving behind a trail of grief and disorientation. What follows is far from contractual disputes over his replacement; here, football (or its behind-the-scenes world) serves merely as the backdrop for devotion and the question of what comes next to emerge. A series of surreal encounters and situations unfolds.
What wreckage does the death of someone leave in those who remain? “Show me your wound?” someone asks in the film. The context of football, often marked by codes of masculinity, spectacle and performance, is displaced into a territory of vulnerability and introspection that emerges from the process of mourning which runs through this team. Nevertheless, elements characteristic of that world persist, from press conferences to backroom dealings, but they appear decentered, stripped of their usual function. We are therefore a long way from the typical sports drama. The football club becomes a space in suspension, where the usual codes no longer organise experience and disquieted subjects are left in a search for meaning.
Not coincidentally, the film’s title is a direct reference to the Sufi poem by Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, in which birds from all over the world gather and decide to set off in search of a king, only to discover that what they were seeking is nothing other than a reflection of their own collective being – something that resides in what they are when they relinquish the ego.
The existential drift that the German-Iranian filmmaker Amin Motallebzadeh pursues with notable restraint in this debut feature is expressed through a singular grammar that moves “in circles rather than in lines”, in a visually compelling register that finds its expression in découpage, sound design, rhythm and language, often charged with spiritual undertones, while not excluding occasional moments of humour.
Conference of the Birds is an immersive sensory experience and a reflection on mourning as a moment of spiritual search and a process of emotional healing.
Susana Santos Rodrigues
