News

Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee used the Cannes spotlight last week to warn that he may face renewed reprisals at home after screening his new drama “Woman and Child,” even though the production was vetted by Tehran’s culture ministry and keeps all female characters in hijab.

At a Cannes press conference on 22 May, Roustaee said, “The last time I went back, my passport was confiscated. I hope I’ll be able to go back safely,” referencing a six-month suspended sentence handed down by a Tehran revolutionary court in August 2023 for screening “Leila’s Brothers” without state approval, an offence that also imposed a five-year filmmaking ban.

The new film, starring Parinaz Izadyar and Payman Maadi, follows a widowed nurse whose remarriage triggers a family tragedy; it is one of 22 titles in this year’s Palme d’Or race and one of two Iranian works, the other being Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident.

As the lights go up on the last of the 22 films in Competition this year, Deadline’s critics reflect on the potential winners in what must be the strongest lineup in recent years…

Pete Hammond

I don’t think I’ve seen a Cannes Film Festival with so many enthusiastic reviews from the press. Only a handful of films seemed to get totally negative notices and none of them across the board. I walked out on a couple, including Resurrection, the Chinese film. Life is just too short. I also didn’t make it through Sebastian Lelio’s The Wave, or the Italian women’s prison flick Fuori despite liking Italians and its star Valeria Golino. I just wasn’t feeling it.

Otherwise, I have to say everything else I saw was above average but some of it overpraised in other quarters. Calm down! I mean, The Secret Agent was good,...

With four features under his belt, three of them ambitious and sprawling ensemble pieces, 35-year-old Iranian wunderkind Saeed Roustaee is the kind of director who takes a big swing for the fences with each new film. His 2019 drug thriller, Just 6.5, was like The French Connection meets The Wire in contemporary Iran. His 2022 family epic, Leila’s Brothers — which, like his new film, premiered in competition in Cannes — had hints of both The Godfather and the searing social dramas of Asghar Farhadi, with some of the best acting in any movie that year.

Roustaee attempts another big swing with Mother and Child, a grandiose modern melodrama filled with love, death, heartache, anger, jealousy, vengeance and possible murder. It’s a lot to take in, and not all of it works despite some more great performances, including from regular leading man Payman Maadi (also an early Farhadi regular in About Elly and...

Bi Gan’s Resurrection received a mix of scores on Screen International’s Cannes Jury Grid, for an overall average of 2.4.

The science fiction detective film, divided into six chapters and starring Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, earned two four-stars (excellent), from Positif’s Nt Binh and The New Yorker’s Justin Chang, as well as four three-stars (good). However, four two-stars (average), a one (poor) and a zero (bad) from Filfan.com’s Ahmed Shawky saw it end up mid-table on the grid.

Click on the image above for the most up-to-date version of the grid.

The film is...

Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee (also spelled Saeed Roustayi – I know its annoying) became part of the Cannes family when he gave us the competition title Leila’s Brothers back in 2022 (read ★★ review). For his fourth feature film, we find him re-teaming with Payman Maadi and Parinaz Izadyar toplines as a mother in distress and with a bit of fight in her step. This follows a 45-year-old widowed nurse named Mahnaz who is raising her children alone and struggling with her rebellious son. As she prepares to marry her fiancé, Hamid, her son Aliyar is expelled from school. When a tragic accident turns everything upside down, Mahnaz sets out to seek justice and reparation.…...

Saeed Roustaee’s Woman and Child immediately immerses us in a specific Tehran, one where a woman’s fortitude is less a celebrated trait and more the daily currency for survival. Stability, it seems, is a luxury item, perpetually on backorder; a societal construct more discussed in theory than experienced in practice, particularly by those not holding the patriarchal reins.

Here, Mahnaz, a widowed hospital nurse, navigates the labyrinthine demands of her existence. Her two children, the spirited, verging-on-hellion teenage son Aliyar and the younger, more placid Neda, are both her anchor and, at times, the gathering storm itself – a common enough paradox in the domestic sphere, yet one freighted here with particular cultural weight.

Mahnaz juggles the relentless pressures of her profession with the intricate, often thankless, dance of single parenthood, all while tentatively exploring a new romantic entanglement with ambulance driver Hamid – a man who, shall we say,...

They say that when one door closes, another door opens. This very much applies to Iranian cinema, and the one-in, one-out approach that the country’s government seems to take when imprisoning its filmmakers. Like the recently released Jafar Panahi, Woman and Child director Saeed Roustaee fell afoul of the authorities in 2023 for having the temerity to submit his last film, Leila’s Brothers, to Cannes without making the necessary changes to please the Ministry of Culture. He was sentenced to nine days in jail, but his new film suggests that the experience has by no means dampened the fire in his filmmaking.

Woman and Child arrives in Cannes at the end of a very satisfying festival, and it could well be an awards contender, being a very satisfying female-fronted drama about a middle-aged widow struggling to raise two children in modern-day Tehran. That woman is Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar), who works double shifts as a nurse,...

Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee had the afternoon competition slot at the Cannes Film festival for his latest movie Woman and Child, which got an 10-minute ovation after it screened Thursday.

Roustaee and star Parinaz Izadyar were among those in attendance for the premiere.

A 10 minute standing ovation for Iranian director Saeed Roustayee’s ‘Woman and Child’ starring Parinaz Izadyar | #Cannes2025 pic.twitter.com/OInN67B9mv

— Deadline (@Deadline) May 22, 2025

The story follows Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar), a 40-year-old widowed nurse who is about to re-marry; she is also struggling with her rebellious son, Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi), who has been suspended from school. Family tensions reach a peak during a betrothal ceremony with her intended Hamid (Payman Maadi), and a tragic accident occurs. In the aftermath, Mahnaz will be forced to confront betrayal and loss, and to embark on a quest for justice.

Roustaee has previously said that Mahnaz’s character “screamed...

Cannes film festival

Saeed Roustaee’s new film takes aim at a slippery, entitled male who thinks he can lord it over a widow he plans to marry

A strange, sad, sombre movie from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose last entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it is about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a man – however shiftless, casual and low-status – can somehow pull rank on a woman in the marriage market.

Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) plays Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a certain roguish ladies-man charm whose unmarried status raises eyebrows among some of his acquaintances, but who...

One of the thrills of watching what we once called “foreign” films is discovering a movie from an entirely different culture and realizing just how similar we all are: Our dreams aren’t so different, nor the things that make us laugh or cry. But there’s always the risk of having the opposite experience, bumping up against a story where nothing corresponds and the behavior seems so illogical or inexplicable that we may as well be watching science fiction. Iranian director Saeed Roustaee’s “Woman and Child” strikes me that way, despite the fact it takes place in a modern metropolis and hails from a director with the most Hollywood touch of his compatriots.

Returning to Cannes after being censured for his 2022 film “Leila’s Brothers,” Roustaee seems undeterred by the six-month prison sentence and since-lifted filmmaking ban the regime imposed on him. No surprise, Iranian authorities don’t take...

Most of us don’t appreciate where our problems sit on a scale from ordinary to tragic. One day your frustrations relate to impressing the family of your intended husband, or to the local school’s struggles to contain your tearaway son. The next day, there are no footholds for this conventional social anxiety because the bottom has fallen out of your world.

Selling a descent from stress into a state of devastation that can never be shed (only briefly reprised) is the formidable actress Parinaz Izadyar. Remarkably, considering how often she is tasked to cry or yell, there is nothing repetitive to her performance. She keeps reacting to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with fresh volatility, not letting her character, Mahnaz, become passive or automated.

Returning to the Cannes competition lineup after 2022’s “Leila’s Brothers” Iranian melodramatist, Saeed Roustayi, proves that he has an Almodovarian flair for...

Iranian director Saeed Roustayee is back in Cannes with “Woman and Child,” a female empowerment drama premiering in competition. The film follows a 40-year-old widowed nurse named Mahnaz, who is struggling with a rebellious son and other complications in a heavily oppressive patriarchal context.

Roustayee’s new work segues from the somewhat similarly themed “Leila’s Brothers,” which launched from Cannes in 2022 and led to the director being sentenced to jail time for screening the film without government approval, though Roustayee did not go behind bars.

Paradoxically, even before “Woman and Child” screened, the film came under fire — sight unseen — from some Iranian industry circles. They claimed that Roustayee sold out to the Iranian government because he produced the film with their permission, and also due to the fact that the women on screen all wear hijabs — which is not a realistic depiction of the current state of affairs given the...

Even before Saeed Roustayee’s “Woman and Child” premieres at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, the Iranian director’s new work is sparking heated controversy that reflects deep soul searching within the turbulent country’s filmmaking community.

The upswell of feelings and opinions that “Woman and Child” is already eliciting, sight unseen, has prompted fellow Iranian helmer Mohammad Rasoulof, who escaped from Iran to Europe in May 2024 after receiving a jail sentence from the country’s authorities for making “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” to come out strongly in Roustayee’s defense. Rasoulof intervened after a group of filmmakers who oppose the Iranian regime claimed that Cannes is bowing to Iran’s repressive authorities by selecting “Woman and Child,” which they say was produced with government permission and should therefore be considered “a propaganda film,” as the Iranian Independent Filmmakers Association (Iifma) has put it in an Instagram post.

The Cannes Film Festival has added a fresh round of titles to its 78th edition, including Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love and Saeed Roustaee’s Woman And Child which will play in the main competition. (scroll down for full list)

Ramsay’s dark comedy thriller Die, My Love transposes Ariana Harwicz’s novel about a woman living in the French countryside who develops severe postpartum depression, to Montana and stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.

Roustaee’s Woman and Child, is the first film from the Iranian director since his 2022 Cannes Palme d’Or contender Leila’s Brothers.

The contemporary family drama of revenge and forgiveness stars Parinaz Izadyar (Law of Tehran) as a widowed nurse struggling with her rebellious son. Tensions reach a peak during the betrothal ceremony with her new boyfriend, but when a tragic accident occurs, she finds herself confronting feelings of betrayal as she seeks justice.

Exclusive: Goodfellas has unveiled one of its biggest European Film Market slates ever featuring upcoming films by Cristian Mungiu, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Saeed Roustaee, Claire Denis, Mario Martone and Raoul Peck.

The company is also handling a trio of Berlin Film Festival titles: Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Golden Bear contender The Ice Tower with Marion Cotillard; Burhan Qurbani’s No Beast. So Fierce. in Berlinale Special; and a fresh acquisition, Bálint Dániel Sós’ Growing Down.

The latter film, which premieres in the new competitive Perspectives section aimed at first films, revolves around a widowed father of two who is tested by fate when he becomes the only witness of a serious accident involving his stepdaughter caused by his youngest son.

Goodfellas will begin pre-sales on Romanian director Mungiu’s first English-language picture Fjord, with Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice) and Cannes Best Actress winner Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World...

A gust of progressive and very feminine wind sweeps through the empty corridors of soon-to-crumble male institution in “The Warden”, second feature from Iranian director Nima Javidi, whose 2014 debut “Melbourne” collected a good deal of awards and consensus. Equally location-centered and set in a closed environment, The Warden is less claustrophobic than “Melbourne” and more evocative and darkly atmospheric.

“The Warden” is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2019

A gallows with its black outline under the pouring rain is the first, strongly allusive scene of the movie. A group of prison wardens is trying to take it apart but the old artifact is too strongly built and refuses to came down. The whole prison building is about to be evacuated and the inmates relocated in new facilities due to the construction of a new airstrip just where the old building sits. Major Jahed (Navid Mohammadzadeh) is the head of...

Pig (Khook) Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten Director: Mani Haghighi Screenwriter: Mani Haghighi Cast: Hasan Majuni, Leila Hatami, Leili Rashidi, Parinaz Izadyar, Mina Jafarzadeh Screened at: Critics’ Link, NYC, 1/6/19 Opens: January 11, 2019 at Iranian Film Festival in NY: at IFC Center, 323 6th Avenue How do you like your Iranian […]

The post Pig Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Lance Daly join Berlinale.

Source: Great Point Media

‘Damsel’

Another ten films have joined the Competition of the 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 15 - 25). Three more have also been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Joining the eight Competition films and two Berlinale Special titles are 13 productions from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong - China, Iran, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Paraguay, People’s Republic of China, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the USA.

Joining the main competition are Barbara and Phoenix director Christian Petzold’s new drama Transit, a contemporary reworking of Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel about refugees attempting to flee through Marseille after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. The film stars Frantz breakout Paula Beer.

Also new to competition is David and Nathan Zellner’s Damsel, the western about a Us businessman who travels to join his fiancée...

Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Lance Daly join Berlinale.

Source: Great Point Media

‘Damsel’

Another ten films have joined the Competition of the 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. Three more have also been selected for the programme of the Berlinale Special.

Joining the eight Competition films and two Berlinale Special titles are 13 productions from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong - China, Iran, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Paraguay, People’s Republic of China, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the USA.

Additional films for both categories are due to be revealed soon. Films announced today are:

Competition

3 Tage in Quiberon (3 Days in Quiberon)

Germany / Austria / France

By Emily Atef (Molly’s Way, The Stranger In Me)

With Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner, Robert Gwisdek, Denis Lavant

World premiere

Black 47

Ireland / Luxembourg

By Lance Daly (Kisses, The Good Doctor)

With Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, [link...