“Don’t change that channel,” says the TV continuity announcer whose voice opens Ava Maria Safai’s Foreigner, “we’ll be right back with more of Two Hearts, One Home.” And then there is an advertisement for the ominously misspelt hair-dye brand “Die Blonde”.
This is a videotape which, back in Iran, Arezoo Karimi (Fujon Pishbin) used to play to her young daughter Yasamin (Barana Bazian) in the hope that she would pick up some English before they moved to Canada. The recording obviously had its influence on Arezoo too, who dyed her hair blonde like one of the Western characters. Now, years later, teen Yasamin (Rose Deghan) is indeed living in Canada with her father Ali (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother Zoreh (Maryam Sadeghi) – but Arezoo died before they could ever leave.
Now Yasamin watches and rewatches the sit-com, reciting all its lines, as a ritualistic way of conjuring the presence of her lost mother, and of feeling a part of the aspirational family depicted on screen. Not only is Yasamin still vulnerable with grief for her beloved mother, but she is also about to have her first day of High School in her new country – a difficult transition at the best of times, made even worse by Yasamin’s deep sense of alienation. Divided between two cultures and two languages, Yasamin will see the growing pains of her gradual assimilation expressed through the clashing interplay of different genres.
As Yasamin speaks with her relatives in Farsi, and with her new schoolfriends in English, it is hard not to think of Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language (2024), with its imaginative merging of Iranian and Canadian societies. Yet the adolescent nature of Yasamin’s outsider experiences have her also following something like the script of Mark Waters’ teen comedy Mean Girls (2004), as she ever so gradually becomes disillusioned with trying to impress the trio of popular girls – Rachel Stanford (Chloë MacLeod) and Rachel’s twin-like identikit acolytes Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart) and Emily (Victoria Wardell) – who take her under their wing while undermining her with the most casually clueless of othering comments.
If the maniacal grins that these three white girls permanently sport recall Parker Finn’s Smile (2022), while their robotic conformity suggests that they are Stepford Wives (1972) in the making, then Yasamin’s shifting allegiances between old family and new friends will eventually express themselves with not just a blonde-dyed makeover, but with something coded more as a possession from a horror movie, and will evoke in particular the cross-cultural rites of passage in Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside (2023).
In keeping with Yasamina’s confounded status, Foreigner catches the viewer between different interpretations. On the one hand, Yasamina is having a psychological breakdown, as not only the legacy of her own late mother’s mental illness but also the conflicting pressures of growing up and being a stranger in a strange land. On the other, as Zoreh insists, Yasamina is being slowly possessed by the same ancient Persian spirit that “lives between our world and the next” and that previously preyed upon her mother (who also addictively watched English-language sit-coms, dyed her hair blonde, and dreamed of moving to Canada).
On any reading, though, this is a story of the divided identity and doubled self that every migrant must negotiate as they try to stay true to who they are while also fitting in. After all, the entire Karimi family is, like a demonic zār, caught between one world and another – and anyone who tries to make a new life in a new place will find themselves with two hearts, one home.
Foreigner had its world première 31 July at Fantasia 2025
