NAHID World Cinema

Sareh Bayat (A SEPARATION, AFI FEST 2011) plays Nahid, a woman whose whole life is a struggle. Her typing job has maimed her hand, and it doesn’t pay enough to cover her rent or the tuition for her son’s school. Though she impoverishes herself to support her son, he refuses to study, preferring to spend time with his father, an addict and inveterate gambler who warns Nahid that, should she remarry, he’ll demand custody of the child. But at least she lives independently — with no man to control her — until the day she tries to improve their life by entering into a “temporary marriage” with a well-off hotelier, first becoming a housewife under his roof, then a ward of her brother’s. In her feature debut, Ida Panahandeh depicts the near impossibility of finding security and happiness within Iran’s strictures of socially enforced respectability. The winner of this year’s Un Certain Regard Prix de l’Avenir at the Cannes Film Festival, NAHID is noteworthy for being the work of an Iranian female director — something that is a rarity. — Gillian Horvat