Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Osamah Sami, Leah Purcell , Selina Zahednia, Jillian Nguyen, Mojean Aria
Intro:
… powerful and sometimes even harrowing stuff, and well-made and acted. It’s definitely worth seeing.
Set in 1995 and drawn from personal experiences, this film centres around an Iranian woman living in an Australian city. Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and her six-year-old daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are staying in a woman’s shelter, and are on the run from her estranged husband Hussein (Osamah Sami), who wants to take Mona back to Iran.
Hossein is an intense, domineering, brutal and intermittently violent man, so there’s an ongoing implicit tension in the story. Each happy, or even just relatively calm scene, has you fearing the next grim one. It’s cyclical and perhaps a bit predictable, but of course that’s precisely how it is for the victims in these all-too-common situations.
Inexcusable as Hussein’s behaviour is, it’s obviously the product of conditioning so all-pervasive that even Shayda’s mother – Mona’s beloved grandmother – sides with him to some extent. But Shayda and Mona are the focus here, and some of the cheery scenes offer interesting details about Persian culture, particularly in the lead-up to Nowruz (Persian New Year).
Shayda is powerful and sometimes even harrowing stuff, and well-made and acted. It’s definitely worth seeing.
