Freedom is often imagined as a moment of release.
A door opens. A boundary is crossed. The ground falls away.
But what if freedom begins somewhere less visible — with the realization that the life you have been living was never entirely your own?
And what happens when acting on that realization means risking the very things you are most afraid to lose?
These questions lie at the heart of Rising from Aras, a feature documentary currently being developed by Schrifton and Filmemrooz.
At its centre is Roshanak, an Iranian woman from the Aras border region whose life has been shaped by a profound fear of loss.
From adolescence into adulthood, that fear influenced the choices she made and, perhaps more importantly, the choices she did not make. Being a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother meant learning to accommodate, to preserve, to avoid the possibility of losing the people around her.
For years, choosing herself hardly seemed like a choice at all.
Then she discovered flight.
Before and After Flight
For Roshanak, paragliding did not simply become a sport.
It introduced a possibility.
In the air, she encountered a version of herself that had little room to exist elsewhere: someone capable of deciding, acting and trusting her own judgement.
Her life gradually divided into two periods — before flight and after it.
The transformation was neither immediate nor heroic in the conventional sense. Flight did not remove the structures surrounding her. It did not resolve her marriage, her responsibilities as a mother, her relationship with her family or the fears she had carried since childhood.
What it changed was her relationship to them.
Once another way of living had become imaginable, returning unquestioningly to the old one became increasingly difficult.
This is where Rising from Aras ceases to be simply a film about paragliding.
It becomes a film about what happens after a person discovers that another life is possible.
The Price of Choosing
Stories about freedom are easily told as stories of triumph.
Someone breaks a rule, crosses a border, leaves a relationship or defies an expectation. The act of liberation becomes the conclusion.
Roshanak's story does not allow such a simple ending.
Her attempt to claim a life of her own brought her into conflict with those closest to her. The consequences were not abstract. Her marriage collapsed. A divorce process stretched across years. Eventually, she faced the loss she had feared above all others: separation from her daughter, Ronak.
The very process through which Roshanak was learning not to be governed by fear led her towards the thing she feared most.
This contradiction forms the emotional centre of the film.
Freedom in Rising from Aras is therefore neither a slogan nor a destination. It is a difficult negotiation between autonomy and attachment, between becoming oneself and remaining connected to those one loves.
The question is not simply whether Roshanak can become free.
It is what she is prepared to lose in order to become herself — and whether freedom can still feel like freedom once the price has been paid.
A Woman, Not a Symbol
There is an obvious temptation in telling the story of an Iranian woman who finds freedom through flight.
The metaphor appears almost ready-made.
The sky becomes freedom.
The ground becomes constraint.
Flight becomes resistance.
Iran becomes explanation.
It is precisely this simplicity that Rising from Aras must resist.
Roshanak's life is more complicated than the symbol available to us.
She is a woman, a mother, a daughter, an athlete. She has been compliant and rebellious, frightened and courageous. She has experienced profound darkness and, through it, developed an intense desire to live.
The film is interested in these contradictions.
Its task is not to make Roshanak representative of all Iranian women. Nor is it to turn her life into evidence for an argument already decided in advance.
It is to remain close enough to one person that larger questions are allowed to emerge from the particularity of her experience.
What does it mean to become an individual after years of understanding yourself through the expectations of others?
What happens when motherhood and autonomy appear to demand incompatible things?
How much can a person lose in the process of becoming herself?
And who is she after the loss?
From Aras to the Sky
Place is not merely a backdrop to Roshanak's story.
She grew up around Aras, in Julfa — a border landscape shaped by proximity and separation. Here, borders are not abstract lines on a map. They belong to the geography of everyday life.
There is something fitting, though not simple, about a story of self-determination beginning in a borderland.
The film moves from the landscapes of Roshanak's childhood to the mountains and skies in which she flies, and into the domestic spaces where the consequences of her choices become intimate.
Rather than constructing a conventional chronological biography, Rising from Aras moves between past and present through intimate interviews, observational footage, personal archives and moments from everyday life.
The spectacle of flight matters.
But so does the return to the ground.
The distance between those two states — the person suspended above a landscape and the same person returning to the unresolved complexities of ordinary life — is where much of the film resides.
Flight offers perspective.
It does not offer escape.
The Right Form
At Schrifton, we do not necessarily begin with a medium. We begin by asking what form an idea, a subject or a life requires.
Roshanak's story asks to be seen.
The geography matters. The body in flight matters. Silence matters. A face remembering something that cannot be reconstructed matters. The contrast between the vastness of the sky and the intimacy of a room matters.
Documentary film allows these things to remain beside one another without forcing them into resolution.
It can hold contradiction.
It can observe without immediately explaining.
And it can allow a person's life to remain larger than the argument that might be made from it.
This is central to the development of Rising from Aras.
The film is not ultimately interested in proving that flight made Roshanak free.
It is interested in something more difficult:
what happened when flight allowed her, perhaps for the first time, to imagine that her life could belong to her.
Everything else follows from that possibility — the courage, the conflict, the losses and the determination to continue living on her own terms.
Perhaps freedom does not begin when the ground falls away.
Perhaps it begins when returning to the ground no longer means returning to the person you were before.
