United Kingdom 2026
English
11 Minutes
Director
Anisa Sabiri
Writer
Anisa Sabiri
Produced By
Anisa Sabiri, Tom Edgerton
With Support From
Locarno Basecamp
Fabbrica Del Vapore
Nocte
Lightwood Green
When left alone with shadows and his imagination, the boundaries between past and present begin to fold for a six year old boy.
A female recalls a distant wartime childhood. The recollection is anchored to a vintage daguerreotype of a vaguely European street that hums with modern life. Drawing back, into the gallery like space, where the picture is exhibited, a young boy chases a ball, with movements governed by dream logic, over any physics.
As the ball rolls into a miniature model at the room’s center, it’s interior reveals a full size space where the boy can observe the ball’s geometric path. All the while his Mother remains engaged in her philosophical narration.
When the boy calls out that he wants to go home, her voice drifts back, asking him to play a little longer. And so he sits, with the now deconstructed model, attempting to piece together its elements as the boundaries between time, space, and reality dissolve.
Inspired by late evening walks in Milan, that reminded the Director of her inaccessible and now erased hometown Dunshanbe, Tajikistan, House of Tarnished Mirrors encapsulates the fragmentation of memory, and the longing of those separated and aging to recapture clusters of the past and their curious perceptual interactions with the present.
Director
Anisa Sabiri
Anisa Sabiri is a London-based filmmaker and researcher, born and raised in a war-time Tajikistan. She brings together speculative fiction and nonfiction, fragmentation and poetic storytelling – to explore layers of erasure and perpetuity of mnemonic space in the moving image. Her films and moving image work were screened internationally, including Locarno Film Festival, Venice Biennale, Asian Film Archive, National Museum of Qatar, Documenta 15, BOZAR, Klassiki, LUX Centre, amongst other institutions. She is an alumna of international talent programmes including the Berlinale Toolbox, CHANEL & BIFF Asian Film Academy, Docmonde, LUX Critical Forum, Locarno Basecamp and Basecamp Altrove; she is a fellow of the Arts Council England DYCP Award.
Awards/Accolades
- World Premiere – Locarno Film Festival, August 2026
Press
- Coming Soon
Lightwood Green 