All Stones Are Millions of Years Old is a fiction feature film project that emerges from long-term research into the lack of access to mental health care in Iran. Through close engagement with families living with untreated or insufficiently treated mental illness, particularly in rural areas, the research includes interviews with family members, local caregivers, and doctors.
The screenplay draws directly from lived experiences. At its centre is an older man living in isolation in a rural area, holding on to a fragile sense of autonomy shaped by his condition, his life sustained by a woman from a nearby village. When his adult daughter arrives from Tehran, her attempt to hospitalise him exposes tensions between care, control, and dignity. The film explores mental illness not as an isolated condition, but as something embedded within wider social, economic, and political realities.
Aliyar Rasti is a visual artist and filmmaker born and based in Tehran.
