On February 25, 2026, Woman and Child, a 2 h 11 Iranian social drama, is released 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 exclusion destabilizes a precarious balance. Then a tragic accident tightens the grip and turns everyday life into a case file, pain into procedure, and motherhood into a struggle. Saeed Roustaee, director of Tehran Law and Leila Brothers, delivers a taut, fluid, deeply political narrative without ever masquerading as a soapbox.
A Story That Moves In Two Acts, Like A Stifled Breath
Roustaee likes beginnings that deceive. He opens Woman and Child at adolescent height, amid the crash of hallways, the whispers that stick to your back, the sanctions that fall like slapstick. Aliyar, played by Sinan Mohebi, crosses the school with stormy energy. He is neither model nor symbol. He shows bursts of bravery as well as stiffness. Moreover, his too-abrupt laughter reveals that mix of innocence and defiance. It makes youth both fragile and dangerous to the established order.
The scene of the exclusion, or rather the way it settles in, sets the tone. Everything is administrative, almost polite, and it is that politeness that chills. An institution does not need to shout to crush. It merely aligns formulas, invokes regulations, requests signatures. The film observes those micro-decisions, those yeses uttered to protect oneself, those slipped nos to avoid exposure. Roustaee knows modern violence often lies in the sum of cautions.
Then the story pivots. A tragic accident, approached without indulgence, reconfigures relationships, redistributes power, reverses roles. Aliyar, until then the center of movement, becomes the axis around which another story turns — his mother’s. The camera begins to follow Mahnaz no longer 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 an idea about the world. First, childhood collides with the rule. Then, the mother collides with the rule that claims to repair. The handover is relentless. Roustaee suggests that one injustice never comes alone. It prepares and calls for other injustices. Then it authorizes them until you realize reality has changed. It happened without asking anyone’s opinion.
Mahnaz, A Heroine Without Pose, A Mother Who Refuses The Arrangement
Mahnaz is a nurse. The film insists 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 other people’s lives. She raises her children alone and is about to marry Hamid. The future, at last, seems to be taking shape. Roustaee films these moments of normality like matches. Anything can ignite.
Parinaz Izadyar composes a Mahnaz both dense and mobile. Her face bears an old fatigue, but her gestures keep an artisan’s precision. She does not play anger; she restrains it, and that is more threatening. We see her negotiate, circumvent, protect, until the event forces her out of strategy. From then on, Mahnaz no longer has the luxury of appeasement. She sets out toward repair, and repair reveals itself as a labyrinth.
The film depicts the quest for justice as a path of closed doors. Offices follow one another, calls go unanswered, appointments are moved, versions change. Mahnaz is asked to be reasonable. The word returns like an injunction of the age. Being reasonable here means keeping quiet, accepting a convenient version, letting the system protect itself. Roustaee films this reason as disguised violence. The real madness, he seems to say, would be to accept the unacceptable.
Opposite Mahnaz, Payman Maadi, in the role of Hamid, brings an essential nuance. He is not the enemy, nor the savior. He is a man who knows the social value of compromise. He knows a scandal does not merely stain one person; it contaminates a family. In a country where surveillance weighs and exposure can cost, discretion becomes a reflex. The film observes this reflex and tests it. At what point does protecting your own mean abandoning one of them?
The Iran Of Service Counters, Or How The Institution Manufactures Silence
Roustaee’s cinema has a rare talent: making mechanisms visible. He films corridors, lines, rooms where people stand for lack of seats, offices where you are not looked at. In Woman and Child, institutional space is not a set; it’s a character, a character that holds the key.
Oppression does not need a single face. It disperses. An official hides behind procedure. A civil servant repeats a guideline. A neighbor spreads a rumor out of caution, jealousy, habit. Corruption, patriarchy, arbitrary power form a dust, and that dust seeps everywhere. Roustaee does not 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 on an almost clinical dimension. You observe protective reflexes, learned phrases, looks that avoid each other. You feel fear, but a practical fear, a fear that organizes daily life. And you 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 Determination To Film Without Being Swallowed
Roustaee imposed himself quickly, with a body of work that feels like acceleration. Since Life and a Day in 2016, he films families as political microcosms. In his work, households are miniature countries with their laws, debts, hierarchies, revolts. Tehran Law confirmed his narrative power. This mix of tension and social chronicle turns an investigation into an X-ray. Leila Brothers pushed the domestic scene even further, up to eruption.
Woman and Child continues this line but shifts it toward a portrait of a woman. She is not an ideal figure but a woman caught in contradictions. She loves, exhausts herself, and loses her temper. Then she calculates before ceasing to calculate. The film also implicitly tells what it means to create under censorship and within constrained conditions. After Cannes 2022, Roustaee’s trajectory clashed with the Iranian justice system. Public information at the time mentioned a six-month prison sentence. Additionally, a supplementary penalty targeted his activity in a case related to the Cannes presentation of his previous film. The situation later evolved, the sanctions having been, according to those same reports, lifted or relaxed.
This context sheds light on the nervousness of his staging. Tight frames, doors, cut conversations, vigilant looks — everything seems charged with an awareness of danger. Roustaee does not turn constraint into a theme. He makes it a tension. His cinema moves like someone crossing a city under curfew: accelerating, looking back, forbidding pause.
A Social Melodrama In The Noble Sense, Where Emotion Holds Its Own Against Facts
The word melodrama is often uttered as a caveat when it should be a promise. For Roustaee, melodrama is not excess; it’s a method. He brings emotion into contact with the social, like an exposed wound to the air. Thus, he watches whether it heals. The film does not seek elegant coldness. 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 does not answer. A door that closes too quickly. A look that says, without saying, you’ve already lost. Roustaee knows when to speed up and when to let the scene charge with electricity. He also knows that anger, to be just, must remain readable. He does not manufacture monsters. He shows people who shelter, 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 a gray zone, essential. The gray zone of compromises that reassure and damage. The gray zone where one believes one saves, 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 time when Iranian cinema, often social, continues to serve as a seismograph. It does not need to comment on current events to touch them. It is enough to show a school, a clinic, or an office. Thus, a society appears with its hierarchies and blind spots.
The French release, supported by Diaphana, gives the film another stage. Here, the viewer does not take the same risks. However, 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 us with physical precision that justice is not just an ideal. It is an experience. It has a smell, a rhythm, hours, forms, expectations.
And perhaps that is where the film hits truest. It does not turn Iran into an exotic backdrop. It films it as a place of ordinary lives, jokes, fatigue, fragile solidarity, tenderness that resists. Politics is not a layer added on. It is in the gestures, in the 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 names the film’s material: a woman and a child, hence a bond, hence vulnerability, hence strength. The runtime, 2 h 11, gives the narrative time to settle, contradict itself, recover. Roustaee does not write straight trajectories. He writes resistances, with retreats, surges, and breaths.
You leave with a lingering image: a mother moving forward. Not a poster heroine, a woman traversed by fear and dignity. Roustaee does not sanctify her. He follows her. And, in following, he makes more than a social film. He makes a portrait, and that portrait has the clarity of a wound.
The film moves toward a broader question: what is the value of truth when everything encourages silence? Mahnaz clings to it, and in doing so, the story lets surface the women rights Iran put to the test, not as a slogan but as the intimate consequence of each procedure, each door, each look.