Ma dar behesht (2015)
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Directors
Cast
Dorna Dibaj, Fariba Kamran, Roya Afshar, Fatemeh Naghavi
A schoolteacher in Tehran tries to escape a stifling routine as bureaucracy and troubling events at her school close in.
The story
Twenty-five-year-old Hanieh lives with her married sister’s family in Tehran and teaches at a girls’ school in a poor suburb. Each morning she makes a long commute under a strict code of conduct, while the school’s restrictive discipline reflects the pressures surrounding her own life. Hanieh applies to transfer to a school in the city, hoping to change her circumstances, but her application disappears into bureaucratic channels. Meanwhile, the school is dealing with a more urgent concern: two students have gone missing and are feared to have been victims of a crime. As daily life wears her down, Hanieh makes small efforts to break out of the cycle she faces.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
Twenty-five-year-old Hanieh lives in her married sister’s household in Tehran and teaches at a girls’ school in a poor suburb. Every morning, Hanieh wraps herself in her large black hijab and makes a long, exhausting commute to work. The girls there are raised with iron discipline and according to a restrictive interpretation of Islam. Hanieh, too, has to submit to the strict code of conduct. The young woman tries to transfer to a school in the city, but her application is stuck somewhere in endless bureaucratic channels. Her school also offers little support for her efforts, as it has more serious problems: two students are missing and are presumed to have been victims of a crime. Increasingly worn down by her stifling daily life and the double-edged reality she is constantly confronted with, she makes small attempts to break out of the cycle of invisible violence, but is unaware of the role she herself plays in this cycle.
Genres
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