Credits: Mehdi Marizad / Fars Media Corporation (attribution required: Fars Media Corporation) / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 4.0.
On February 25, 2026, Woman and Child, a 2 h 11 Iranian social drama, opens in France, distributed by Diaphana. Presented in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the film follows Mahnaz, mother of two children, as her son Aliyar’s school expulsion upends a precarious balance. Then a tragic accident tightens the grip and turns everyday life into a case file, pain into procedure, motherhood into a fight. Saeed Roustaee, director of Tehran Law and Leila and Her Brothers, signs a taut, flowing, deeply political narrative without ever pretending it’s a platform.
A Story That Advances in Two Acts, Like A Broken Breath
Roustaee likes deceptive beginnings. He opens Woman and Child at the height of adolescence, amid the crash of corridors, whispers clinging to backs, sanctions falling like bumpers. Aliyar, played by Sinan Mohebi, moves through school with stormy energy. He is neither model nor symbol. He shows bursts of bravery as well as stiffness. His too-quick laughs reveal that mixture of innocence and defiance. It makes youth both fragile and dangerous to the established order.
The expulsion scene, or rather the way it sets in, sets the tone. Everything is administrative, almost polite, and it is that politeness that chills. An institution doesn’t need to shout to crush. It lines up forms, invokes regulations, demands signatures. The film watches these micro-decisions, these yeses uttered to protect oneself, these nos slipped in to avoid exposure. Roustaee knows modern violence often lies in the sum of precautions.
Then the story pivots. A tragic accident, handled without indulgence, reshapes relationships, redistributes power, reverses roles. Aliyar, until then the center of the movement, becomes the axis around which another story turns, his mother’s. The camera begins to follow Mahnaz not as the adult who patches things up, but as the woman who demands. The film changes pace, not breath. The same tension remains, only shifted. What was a school chronicle becomes a chronicle of survival.
This two-movement construction is not a screenwriting trick; it’s a view of the world. First, childhood collides with rules. Then the mother collides with the rules that claim to repair. The handoff is relentless. Roustaee suggests that one injustice never comes alone. It prepares and calls forth others. Then it allows them until you realize that reality has changed. It happened without asking anyone’s opinion.
Mahnaz, A Non-Posing Heroine, A Mother Who Refuses The Arrangement
Mahnaz is a nurse. The film lingers little on it, but it’s enough. She knows bodies, pain, urgency, the night. She also knows protocols, that cold language that pretends to be neutral. Yet she decides for others’ lives. She raises her children alone and is about to marry Hamid. The future, finally, seems to be taking shape. Roustaee films these moments of normality like matchsticks. Everything can ignite.
Parinaz Izadyar composes a Mahnaz both dense and mobile. Her face bears an old weariness, but her movements retain the precision of a craftsperson. She doesn’t act anger; she contains it, and it’s more threatening. We see her negotiate, sidestep, protect, until the event forces her out of strategy. From then on, Mahnaz no longer has the luxury of calm. She sets out toward repair, and repair turns out to be a labyrinth.
The film depicts the quest for justice as a path of closed doors. Offices succeed one another, calls go dead, appointments shift, accounts change. They ask Mahnaz to be reasonable. The word returns, like an injunction of the age. To be reasonable here means to keep quiet, accept a convenient version, let the system protect itself. Roustaee films that reason as disguised violence. The real madness, he seems to say, would be to accept the unacceptable.
Opposite Mahnaz, Payman Maadi, as Hamid, brings an essential nuance. He is not the enemy, nor the savior. He’s a man who knows the social value of compromise. He knows a scandal doesn’t just stain a person; it contaminates a family. In a country where surveillance weighs and exposure can cost, discretion becomes reflex. The film observes this reflex and tests it. At what point does protecting your own become abandoning one of them?
The Iran of Service Counters, Or How The Institution Manufactures Silence
Roustaee’s cinema has a rare talent for making mechanisms visible. He films corridors, queues, rooms where you stand for lack of seats, offices that don’t look at you. In Woman and Child, institutional space is not a set; it’s a character, a character that holds the key.
Oppression doesn’t need a single face. It disperses. An official hides behind procedure. A clerk repeats an instruction. A neighbor spreads a rumor, out of caution, jealousy, habit. Corruption, patriarchy, arbitrariness form a dust, and that dust seeps everywhere. Roustaee doesn’t caricature. He shows how a society can lock itself down without displaying weapons. It happens only through use, suspicion, and fatigue.
The film then takes an almost clinical dimension. We observe protective reflexes, learned phrases, looks that avoid each other. We feel fear, but a practical fear, a fear that organizes daily life. And we understand why revolt is so difficult. It requires time, risk, endurance. It requires believing that truth has value. Mahnaz clings to it, not as an abstract idea, but as a piece of life.
Saeed Roustaee, The Stubbornness To Film Without Being Swallowed
Roustaee imposed himself quickly, with a body of work that feels like an acceleration. Since Life and a Day in 2016, he films families as political microcosms. In his work, homes are miniature countries, with their laws, debts, hierarchies, revolts. Tehran Law confirmed his narrative power. This mix of tension and social chronicle turns a hunt into an X-ray. Leila and Her Brothers pushed the domestic scene even further, up to eruption.
Woman and Child extends this line but shifts it toward a portrait of a woman. This isn’t an ideal figure, but a woman caught in contradictions. She loves, exhausts herself, and loses her temper. Then she calculates before she stops calculating. The film also tells, by implication, what it means to create under censorship and within constraints. After Cannes 2022, Roustaee’s trajectory clashed with the Iranian justice system. Public reports at the time mentioned a six-month prison sentence. In addition, an additional penalty targeted his activity in a case linked to his film’s Cannes presentation. The situation then evolved, the sanctions having been, according to those same reports, lifted or eased.
This context illuminates the nervousness of his staging. Tight frames, doors, cut conversations, watching looks—everything seems charged with an awareness of danger. Roustaee does not turn constraint into theme. He makes it a tension. His cinema advances like crossing a city under curfew: accelerating, looking back, forbidding pause.
A Social Melodrama In The Noble Sense, Where Emotion Stands Up To Facts
The word melodrama is often spoken as a reservation, when it should be a promise. For Roustaee, melodrama is not excess; it’s a method. He puts emotion in contact with the social, like an exposed wound to the air. Thus, he watches whether it heals. The film does not seek chilly elegance. It prefers controlled incandescence.
The success lies in the constant link between the large machinery and the detail. A hand hesitating before signing. A phone that doesn’t answer. A door that closes too fast. A look that says, without saying, that you’ve already lost. Roustaee knows when to speed up and when to let a scene charge with electricity. He also knows that to be just, anger must remain readable. He doesn’t make monsters. He shows people who shelter themselves, who protect themselves, who sometimes participate despite themselves.
Sinan Mohebi, in the first part, gives Aliyar a vitality that makes the tipping point crueller. He is not sanctified. He is alive, therefore unpredictable. Payman Maadi keeps the film in an essential gray zone—the gray zone of compromises that comfort and harm. The gray zone where one thinks one is saving, and ends up betraying.
Cannes 2025, Then France, A Film That Crosses Borders Without Losing Its Accent
Presented in competition at Cannes in spring 2025, Woman and Child arrives in France at a moment when Iranian cinema, often social, continues to act as a seismograph. It doesn’t need to comment on current events to touch them. Showing a school, a clinic, or an office is enough. Thus a society appears with its hierarchies and blind spots.
The French release, carried by Diaphana, gives the film another stage. Here, the viewer doesn’t take the same risks. Yet they recognize familiar sensations like vertigo in the face of procedures. They also perceive the violence of official versions and the humiliation of being reduced to a file. Roustaee reminds with physical precision that justice is not only an ideal. It’s an experience. It has a smell, a rhythm, hours, forms, waits.
And that is perhaps where the film hits truest. It doesn’t turn Iran into an exotic set. It films it as a place of ordinary lives, jokes, fatigue, fragile solidarity, tenderness that endures. Politics isn’t an added layer. It’s in gestures, in spaces, in the way a mother is asked to make herself small.
A Film Sheet Like A Noir Novel Without A Detective
The original title, Zan o Bacheh, simply states the film’s matter: a woman and a child, therefore a bond, therefore a vulnerability, therefore a strength. The 2 h 11 running time gives the story time to settle, contradict itself, recover. Roustaee doesn’t write straight trajectories. He writes resistances, with setbacks, surges, and breathing spaces.
You leave with a persistent image: a mother moving forward. Not a poster heroine, a woman crossed by fear and dignity. Roustaee does not sanctify her. He follows her. And by following, he does more than a social film. He makes a portrait, and that portrait has the clarity of a wound.
The film moves toward a larger question: what is truth worth when everything encourages silence? Mahnaz clings to it, and in doing so, the story lets surface the women rights Iran challenged, not as a slogan but as the intimate consequence of every procedure, every door, every look.