The title of the film refers to a poem composed in Arab by the Persian mystic Bahá’u’lláh in 1858, by the Tigris river, a poem that belongs to his work “The Hidden Words”:
O son of man! Wert thou to speed through the immensity of space and traverse the expanse of heaven, yet thou wouldst find no rest save in submission to Our command and humbleness before Our Face.
Submission to a superior being who transcends the human world is conceived as a path to free oneself from suffering and subjugation of some human beings to others, because the “servant” admits only being servant of that Being, and not of an equal. If we follow this logic, even the clergy’s prerogatives would be a nuisance, since they would mean the subjugation of a group of human beings (the parishioners) to others (the clergy). In contemporary terms we could speak of the need to shake off the chains of neo-slavery to which huge working sectors are subject, of which a clear case -among many others we could mention- are the grant holders who perform bachelor work for years, without any working rights and a salary that barely allows them to survive.
By choosing an ocean and a desert as the main locations in the film, we want to isolate our characters from their social environments and show them on an empty stage, where we underline the vulnerability of human beings faced with the big socioeconomic forces at work in today’s world, on which regular people have no knowledge or control.
