Beyond The Wall

Ali (Navid Mohammadzadeh, No Date, No Signature, SFF 2018) is a deeply depressed man confined to a dank flat in a vast, forbidding apartment block. His life is suddenly interrupted when he is questioned by police about Leila (Diana Habibi), a fugitive implicated in an officer’s death during a protest by factory workers. But Leila is already hiding in Ali’s home. She is desperate to find her young son who was lost during the riot, and Ali becomes a willing accomplice. But as they reveal their stories to each other, the truth seems ever more elusive. Jalilvand’s depiction of contemporary Iran is dystopian, even nightmarish, with gritty realism offset by an unsettling mood of horror.