Yalda

Massoud Bakhshi's 2019 film is built on a reconstruction of a real Iranian television programme. Maryam, who accidentally killed her husband Nasser, has been sentenced to death, and the only person who can save her is Nasser's daughter Mona. All Mona has to do is appear on a television show and say she forgives her. The programme rests on the legal force of a victim's family granting pardon in a retribution case, and turns that pardon into a spectacle staged live between viewer votes and advertisements. Almost everything takes place in the studio, and that is where the tension comes from: two women forced to relive the past while the cameras are running. Bakhshi's subject is not justice but the making of justice into a show. The encounter between Sadaf Asgari and Behnaz Jafari is the film's centre. It won the world cinema dramatic grand jury prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Who it's for: viewers who like Iranian cinema and films that interrogate the relationship between justice and media. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding content about capital punishment and domestic violence, or who will find the single-location television format visually confined.