Goodbye

In Tehran, Noora, stripped of her licence to practise law, is looking for a way out of the country. Her husband is far away and it is unclear when he will return. Her pregnancy might be a route out, until a diagnosis reverses that too. Every door asks for another signature, another permit, another wait. The film is not interested in political argument. It is interested in the silence of bureaucracy: nobody says no to Noora, everybody sends her to another room. The pressure in the film does not shout, it works through paperwork. The form is cold and still: blue-grey colours, a fixed camera, cramped flats and empty corridors. The director barely uses a close-up. Mohammad Rasoulof wrote and directed. He had been arrested in 2010 and sentenced to six years in prison; out on parole while his appeal was pending and banned from making films, he shot this in semi-underground conditions in the winter of 2010. It won Best Director in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2011, and Rasoulof was not permitted to attend. Leila Zare plays Noora. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet resistance narratives from Iranian cinema and minimal form. Who it is not for: anyone expecting movement. The film is deliberately still, most events happen off-screen, and it offers no hope.