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Venice Film Festival’s red carpet swapped glamour for politics on Saturday, hosting a flash mob in solidarity with the Iranian people, fighting against repression, as well as filmmakers who are being oppressed – and arrested – because of their work.

Such as “Leila’s Brothers” director Saeed Roustaee, recently sentenced to six months in prison for showing the film in Cannes. He has also been banned from making movies.

“Born in 1989, Roustaee represents a new generation of Iranian auteurs, and one who’s sly enough to embed his complex social critiques so deep into the fabric of sprawling modern stories that he hasn’t upset the regime. Not yet, at least,” ominously wrote Variety’s Peter Debruge following its premiere at the French fest.

Roustaee also made “Life and a Day” and thriller “Just 6.5,” which was shown in Venice.

Elham Erfani, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi and guests attend the Flash Mob in Solidarity With Iranian People.

Saeed Roustayi’s tense policier about a cop hunting a drug kingpin deftly mixes brutality and gallows farce

This increasingly nerve-jangling narco policier from Life and a Day writer-director Saeed Roustayi, who has since made the feted 2022 Palme d’Or contender Leila’s Brothers, was hailed as Iran’s highest-grossing non-comedic domestic film. Not that Law of Tehran (Aka Just 6.5), which won the audience award at Iran’s Fajr film festival back in 2019, is without a pointedly nihilistic streak of jet-black humour. For proof, check out the horrifyingly absurdist opening salvo: a drug bust that turns into a breakneck, on-foot chase sequence, climaxing in a lethal disappearing act that combines the vérité grit of The French Connection with the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton. Really. It’s a deliberately bewildering cocktail of brutal tragedy and gallows farce that runs throughout this very arresting feature.

Playing out amid the human...

One of the two Iranian entries at this year’s Cannes competition, this is Saeed Roustayi‘s first time. Starring Taraneh Alidoosti, Saeed Poursamimi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Payman Maadi — Leila’s Brothers is the filmmaker first trip to Cannes. Previously he directed Life and a Day (2016) and Just 6.5 (2019).

With a 2h45 runtime, this centers around Leila — the young matriarch having to juggle many agendas – excluding her own. Caring for her parents and four brothers — this is at once a parable about debt, being indebted and a patriarchal overreach.

Currently with fifteen of our twenty critics having graded the film, despite some support Leila’s Brothers enters the grid at a paltry 2.7 — which places this almost at the bottom.…...

In “Leila’s Brothers,” a once proud, now pathetic Persian family teeters on the brink of ruin, held together by the assertive sister who’s tired of relying on men to decide her fortune. Taking matters into her own hands may be empowering to watch — there’s no question that “The Salesman” alum Taraneh Alidoosti, who plays Leila, towers over this male-dominated ensemble — but it’s also a recipe for potential tragedy in Iranian writer-director Saeed Roustaee’s novelistic, nearly-three-hour saga, his first to be selected for Cannes.

Some audiences may recognize Roustaee from another turbulent family portrait, “Life and a Day” (2016), whereas it was his terrific cop thriller “Just 6.5” (2019) — the closest thing Iran has produced to “The French Connection,” still unreleased in the U.S. — that put the helmer on my radar. Born in 1989, Roustaee represents a new generation of Iranian auteurs, and one who’s sly enough to...

than the crowdsourced YouTube doc “Life in a Day 2020.” The internet video behemoth foretold a new era of DIY filmmaking when it launched in 2005, and just five years later it tried give an artistic patina to the amateur works that defined the site with “Life in a Day,” an assortment of uploaded clips given some coherence by veteran documentarian Kevin Macdonald. The result was meant to be profound, a glimpse at the beauty of the ordinary. But it was just ordinary.

A decade later, YouTube and Macdonald have doubled down with “Life in a Day 2020,” which leans into the gravitas — and what better year to get “deep” than 2020? Over 320,000 amateur videographers from 192 countries uploaded videos shot on July 25, 2020, and the footage could be anything. Some are performance works: a Black guy sings the Schubert Lied “The Elf King” in crisp, precise German; one teenage Italian girl poses coquettishly...