Mary Darling’s ‘Cast Aside the Clouds’ Explores Baha’i Faith and Love

As she puts her Baha’i faith center stage in Cast Aside The Clouds, don’t expect director Mary Darling to be preachy about the Prophet known as The Báb, and his unique take on world unity and peace.

Darling, who co-wrote the Tehran-set romantic thriller along with fellow Baha’i and husband Clark Donnelly, deliberately explores themes of faith, morality and forgiveness through a love story between two young Iranians: Layla (Parmiss Sehat), a Baha’i woman who faces persecution for her faith, and Dr. Sasan Naderi (Behtash Fazlali), a young secular Muslim neurologist who treats a hospitalized Layla, only to fall in love with her.

“We’re just letting people kind of enjoy the characters for a little bit, before we drop that bomb on them,” Darling tells The Hollywood Reporter after a screening for the Persian and English language drama at the Hamilton Film Festival. Soon enough, their unexpected romance is tested by opposition from their families, with Sasan getting an offer to practice medicine in Germany and Layla being arrested, imprisoned and brutally interrogated for being a Baha’i woman seeking an education.

Darling explains she intentionally delayed revealing that Layla and her family — including 24 actor Anthony Aziz playing her father, a Tehran bookstore owner — are members of Iran’s marginalized Baha’i faith until well into the movie (the Bahaʼi face persecution in Iran primarily because their faith is considered a heretical offshoot of Islam).

“We held off until page 30 of the script, because we wanted people, especially those with a prejudice, to have a chance to fall in love with Layla,” she explains of the character played by Sehat, an Iranian actor raised in Vancouver whose TV credits include Designated Survivor, The Good Doctor and The 100.

The film’s audience does not explicitly learn of Layla’s religious faith until it’s revealed she attends a secret university aligned with the Iranian Baha’i community and one of her banned professors remarks on the destruction of Baha’i sites in Iran. Once she is imprisoned along with her professor in Tehran’s brutal Evan prison, Layla and Sasan’s families race against time to secure her release.

“So often in films, we don’t actually trust the audience to think about what they’re watching,” Darling argues. Indeed, the film — which recently screened to a warm reception at the Hamilton Film Festival in Ontario — allows viewers to arrive at their own conclusions over why Layla and her family face prejudice in Iran, and why as a Baha’i woman she ultimately decides to defy her interrogator and stick to her beliefs and values.

“Curiosity is in short supply these days,” adds Darling. “So we tried to create something that just lets people just ask, why?”

Darling is no stranger to content that breaks down barriers. She is the co-creator of the classic Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, the fish-out-of-water comedy that challenged stereotypes by portraying a community of devout Muslims living in a small prairie town. The show aired on the CBC network from 2007 to 2012 and internationally in over 80 markets.

Cast Aside The Clouds, initially inspired by the book Khaterate Utab by Rouhieh Fanaian, also set Layla and Sasan’s forbidden romance within a broader lens of religious persecution worldwide — from Uyghurs in China and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar to Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East — underscoring the need for global unity, a key tenet of the Baha’i faith.

Says Darling: “If you think about what are the component parts of a unified vision, anybody can participate in activities that are trying to move in that direction. You don’t have to be one particular religion or another.”