Farhad is a well-known scholar of ancient Persian texts who leaves Teheran and his university professorship all of a sudden and hides in Umbria. After a 15-years-old silence, he invites his daughter to join him and Parvaneh, despite the pain of an abandonment she cannot explain, accepts.

During a dramatic walk along the river, two birds stare at him with the same suspicious look of the cruel Government Police, while the professor unfolds his whole life, the most private memories, his hidden feelings and the fears and concerns that have been tormenting him.

The look jumps from Persia to Italy, from the ruins of the old city of Firusabad and the Zoroastrian temples to the alleys of the Medieval town in Umbria, from the expands of opium poppies to the shores of the the Tiber. Il fiume tra di noi is the story of an Iranian intellectual at the turn of the laic dictatorship of the last Shah Reza Palhavi and the Islamic State of the ayatollah Khomeini, lost and estranged in a country divided between the Liberist innovation and the religious exploitation of classical culture.