This is about a young man (Amin Simiar) on a road trip with his mother (Pantea Panahiha), father (Hassan Madjooni), and younger brother (Rayan Sarlak). He’s leaving his Iranian hometown for a somewhat mysterious purpose, but it’s not hard to gather what happened, especially when you hear the work by exiled singers on the radio and knowing that Panahi’s spent the last ten years watching his father struggle to live and express himself under house arrest.
Criticism of his country’s authoritarian regime and the psychological toll it takes on ordinary people is implicit in every stage of the journey but achieved with the lightest of touches. For ultimately, as with much of the enduring work of his father and other recent Iranian cinema icons, from Abbas Kiarostami to Asghar Farhadi to the Makhmalbafs, these are stories both culturally specific and able to evoke universal experiences that connect beyond borders.
