Maya (2020)

Daily life at Iran’s second biggest zoo is interrupted when Mohsen, the head keeper, takes Maya, his 4 year old Bengal tiger, to perform in a fiction film in the north of the country by the Caspian Sea which was once home to the now extinct caspian tiger. In between filming, Mohsen lets Maya off the leash and allows her to roam in this sparsely populated landscape – she is the first ‘free’ tiger in Iran in over 60 years. But instead of the perfect experience of the wild that Mohsen hopes it to be, the trip kickstarts a series of events that mark the end of Mohsen and Maya’s relationship and in the process reveals a much darker and more complex side to Mohsen and the Zoo in which Maya and the other animals are kept.

Anson HartfordDirector