Woman And Child
A poignant and compelling social-realist drama in which Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee (Leila’s Brothers, Just 6.5) exposes the workings of the patriarchal marriage market in Tehran.
Forty-year-old widow Mahnaz has her hands full. She’s juggling her work as a nurse, raising two children and spending time with her boyfriend Hamid, who has proposed marriage. If that wasn’t enough, her rebellious teenage son Aliyar has just been suspended from school after one prank too many. On the day that Hamid’s parents visit to meet Mahnaz so they can approve of the wedding, tragedy strikes, upending Mahnaz’s precariously balanced life. Her unspeakable grief twists into incandescent rage as she resolves to punish everyone responsible for her pain – by whatever means necessary.
Iranian Saeed Roustaee injects this domestic drama with the same pulse-quickening intensity of his drug trafficking thriller Just 6.5. It is a portrait of a woman who refuses to be sidelined, in a country where women – including within the legal system – effectively have no say. As such, this feminist indictment is yet further proof that Iranian filmmakers continue to find the courage to speak out about the situation in their country. Woman And Child is Roustaee’s first film since a six-month prison sentence and five-year filmmaking ban (subsequently suspended) for his film Leila’s Brothers.