Iranian-Canadian Filmmaker Mani Haghighi Reflects on His Hitchcockian Thriller “Subtraction”

variety.com:

Alissa Simon Film Critic Overline: Hed: By Alissa Simon “Subtraction,” from idiosyncratic Iranian helmer-writer Mani Haghighi (“Men at Work,” “Modest Reception,” “A Dragon Arrives!”) is a tense Hitchcockian thriller set in Tehran, where a heavy, non-stop rainfall signals a lingering malaise.

There, a young couple come across their doppelgängers. The film premiered at the Toronto festival. The idea for the plot grew out of the helmer’s long-ago trip to Southwest Iran to look at places where the Iran-Iraq war took place. “It was a hot summer day and I wandered into a local mosque to cool down and get some rest,” Haghighi says. “The people who ran the mosque had put on an exhibition of photographs from the war years.

I was casually looking at these pictures and I was suddenly transfixed by one of them. It was a picture of me, in military uniform, badly wounded in the neck, being carried by two other soldiers.

As one of the characters says in ‘Subtraction,’ ‘It’s not like he looked like me, he was my absolute clone!’ I was so confused that I asked others to verify what I was seeing, and everybody was sure it was a picture of me, except that, at the time of the war, I was much younger than the man in the picture, I was just a 10-year-old kid.