'I Plant My Hand in the Garden' to Premiere at Venice Days 2026
A debut feature co-directed by Hoda Taheri and Boris Hadžija will have its world premiere on September 3 in the Venice Days competition at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, with a trailer arriving ahead of the screening (The Hollywood Reporter).
The film, titled I Plant My Hand in the Garden, is an 83-minute fiction feature rooted in the lives of its own makers. Its protagonists are Hoda, an Iranian refugee living in Berlin, and Boris, a queer man from Serbia, who decide to marry and raise a child. Taheri and Hadžija co-wrote and co-directed the film and also star in it, appearing alongside Branka Hadžija, Jahandokht Taheri, and Hadi Khanjanpour (The Hollywood Reporter).
Venice Days, or Giornate degli Autori, is the independent section of the Venice Film Festival, programmed by Italian film-maker associations Anac and 100autori. The 2026 competition runs September 2–12. The film's premiere is set for September 3 at 17:00 in Sala Perla, with an additional public screening on September 12 at 19:15 in Sala Corinto, according to the official Biennale Cinema 2026 programme (labiennale.org).
Taheri, who is from Iran, and Hadžija, who is from Serbia, arrive at Venice with a strong festival track record. Their short-film trilogy — Mother Prays All Day Long (2022), As If Mother Cried That Night (2023), and Mother Is a Natural Sinner (2024) — all premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. Their short Yugotransport – We Are All on the Same Bus (2023) screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (The Hollywood Reporter).
Behind the camera, the film draws talent from across Europe. Lithuanian cinematographer Vytautas Katkus handled the photography, and Hadžija took on the editing. Maximilian Feldkamp produced the film for DFFB, the German film academy in Berlin, with co-production by Cruising in Germany, Naked in Serbia, and Mala Productions LLC in the United States. The film is formally classified as a Serbian minority co-production, meaning the largest share of the financing originates outside Serbia (Film New Europe).
Square Eyes, the Amsterdam-based international sales company, acquired world rights to the film ahead of its Venice Days premiere and will handle global sales — the role of finding distributors in each territory after a festival launch (Variety).
For a debut feature, the film carries an unusually personal architecture. The two directors play characters who share their own first names and backgrounds, and Hadžija's family members appear in the cast alongside his co-director's. The boundary between the film-makers and the story they are telling is deliberately thin, and Venice Days — a section built around independent and auteur cinema — is the platform they have chosen for it.
