SEASONLESS

ONE LINE SYNOPSIS:
When a mother is presented with the body of a dead soldier by the Iranian army (Kurdish), she refuses to give up faith that her son will return home.

LONG SYNOPSIS:
It’s twilight. The villagers are burying a burned body of a soldier in a remote area. Among the wailing and mourning, an old woman with a young girl walks, screaming and crying among the crowd. The old woman approaches the body of her son. She is restless and wants to see her son’s face although the mourners try to warn her against it. As she sees the burned, unrecognisable face of the soldier, a dead silence spreads across the crowd. The mother leaves without saying a word as the crowd watches her in shock. She tells the girl—her son’s bride to be, that she doesn’t believe that the body is her son.

Even so, every week, the mother walks a long distance from the village to the cemetery to visit the soldier’s grave and spends some quiet time talking with the buried soldier. While every day she asks the village postman if he has any letters from her son. She listens to the old radio to keep herself up to date on the war against ISIS, in hope of news from her son. The old woman refuses to approve of a grave headstone in the name of her son since she believes he will return one day and instead placed a tree branch above the grave. The old woman sings a lullaby and dances for the buried solider.

Gradually, the young bride who has been her only confidant starts thinking that the old woman has lost her mind. The bride’s brother insists she remarries which she eventually does, leaving the village and the old woman behind. From then on, the old woman continues to visit the grave by herself. Time passes by and the seasons change as the crows fly over the old woman’s cherry garden. The tree branch the old woman had planted above the soldier’s grave has now turned green and the cross of Christ can also be seen above the grave.

After many months of waiting, the old woman shows up at the grave of the unknown soldier with a wheelchair. Her son, injured, has returned from the war and learns that his mother has been talking to a dead soldier who was buried on the land by mistake. And although her son has now returned to her, she continues to visit the soldier’s grave. She will not leave him as he is still a fallen solider – someone’s son, in need of a mother to mourn him.