Overview
Tage Und Nächte follows Sophie through the disorientating weeks after losing someone she loved. Her friends stay close, but even Marie, her closest confidante, starts to run out of patience for a grief that won’t resolve itself. No ritual heals it. Nothing forces it shut. The film sits inside that state until, almost without announcement, ordinary life starts to let her back in.
Production
Reihaneh Youzbashi Dizaji wrote and directed the film, shot on a RED camera with anamorphic glass around Berlin between July 2024 and February 2025. Üstün Yildirim, the film’s composer and sound designer (and someone I’d already worked with on other projects), introduced me to Reihaneh for the grade.
Post Production
Reihaneh built the film around two distinct states: a grounded reality that shifts the tone scene to scene: drunk and unsteady outside a bar, softer by the lake, and a surreal register that gradually pulls Sophie away from the people around her. She mapped the exact transition points between the two, timecode by timecode, so the grade could track her drift into and out of that dissociative space rather than just illustrating individual scenes.
We worked from visual references pulled together from ShotDeck so that we were both working from the same references rather than a vague mood board. The rule I kept coming back to was to let her reference stills guide the target without pulling the grade further from what was actually already sitting in the footage. Skew too far from a shot’s native palette and it would stop reading as the same film.
Festivals & Awards
