Three films by Iranian women that tackle the restrictive conditions imposed on them

Since the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Tehran's morality police after she was arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code, Iran has been very much on the minds and lips of furious human rights advocates both on its streets and across the globe.

Protests have raged across the country for the past month. They have been led by brave women and offer what many see as the most serious challenge to the religious fundamentalist authorities who govern Iran in decades.

Though its laws and treatment of women have made it the target of international outcry for decades, the country’s cinema has a rich history of managing to quietly and movingly criticise and question Iranian society in spite of threats and retribution against filmmakers by the regime.

Here, in tribute to the fighting spirit of the people and particularly the women of Iran, are three films by female Iranian filmmakers that tackle the complexities of navigating life under the suffocatingly restrictive conditions imposed on them.

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC

• The Apple — Mubi.com

A docudrama that brilliantly blurs the line between reality and fiction, The Apple marked the feature film directorial debut of now legendary filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf in 1998 when she was just 18-years-old. Daughter of the equally renowned Iranian social-realist master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Samira’s film shows a precocious and mature concern with the thorny ethical questions around the relationship between documentary directors and their subjects and was made during a short-lived period in which it seemed as if Iran was opening itself up to some transformation of its rigidly religious society.

The film follows the true story of 12-year-old twin sisters who became the subject of much media attention in Tehran after neighbours discovered that they had been held prisoner from birth in their house by their 65-year-old unemployed father in one of the city’s poor neighbourhoods. The father told authorities that he had taken this drastic action because he believed that allowing his daughters to live a normal life would lead to their corruption by men and temptation from the irreligious evils of the outside world.

Makhmalbaf enlists the two girls — barely able to read or speak, horribly dirty and distinctly socially awkward — along with their parents and real neighbours to play themselves in a re-enactment of their experience.

While the film avoids taking a definite side in the debate about religious fundamentalism and the necessity for it to adapt to the demands and changes of the modern world, it paints a moving and touching portrait of the twins and their attempts, with the help of a caring social worker, to reintegrate into the small and ordinary rhythms of a world they were so cruelly prevented from knowing. It also gives them the much needed opportunity to demonstrate their underlying innocence and humanity. 

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THE ART HOUSE ESSENTIAL

• The Ballad of a White Cow — Mubi.com

Co-directed by Maryam Moghadam — who also stars — and Behtash Saneeha this is a tightly plotted, carefully structured drama that interrogates Iran’s violently retributive justice system and its ultraconservative attitudes to women. Moghaddam plays Mina, a widow who is matter-of-factly and without apology informed a year after her husband’s execution for murder that he was in fact innocent of the crime.

As if that weren’t enough to shatter her tenuous grasp on the tragedies of her reality, she must also deal with the overbearing, unwanted attentions of her husband’s brother who, with the blessing of his family, demands that she marry him. She’s already been fired from her job — because this is not a society that tolerates widowed female workers — kicked out of her apartment and left with no help from anyone to raise her deaf and mute daughter alone.

However, while this may appear to be the set-up for a relentlessly depressing social realist tragedy set against the backdrop of an oppressive society that places unbearable and often unmanageable pressure on women, there is a sliver of hope that seems to be offered when a strange, seemingly kind man arrives on Mina’s doorstep to tell her that he is a friend of her late husband who wishes to help her get justice for his wrongful execution.

Slowly, emotionally effectively and movingly the film works towards a bittersweet conclusion that demonstrates that Mina, like so many women in similar situation in ultraconservative Iran, can’t trust anything men tell her and must find the strength within herself to survive.

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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

• Botox — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Kaveh Mazaheri’s bleak, wintry thriller debut centres on two sisters who share a house on the outskirts of an Iranian town, who when their bullying brother disappears decide to lie about his whereabouts to push ahead with their plan of growing psychedelic mushrooms. In a society where men are given ultimate authority to sign off decisions and women are prevented from doing anything without male permission, the disappearance of their brother has major consequences for the sisters if it were to be discovered.

However, the crushing weight of their shared secret and the pressure it places on them — particularly on the older sister who suffers from autism — soon threatens to tear the sisters apart. Absurdist but never comic, dramatic but never showy and humane but never mawkish, it’s ultimately an assured, grimly pertinent and twisty thriller that makes its broader political points with damningly quiet effectiveness that doesn’t need to hit you over the head to transmit its message.

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