Yadollah Najafi

Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Rakshan Banietemad ends her eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking with this ingenious, mosaic-like narrative, which knits together the stories of seven characters to create a microcosm of Iranian working-class society.

The story of Imam Hossein's battle in Karbala, an unfair war which made one the most important effects in Islam history.

The uneasy relationship between a mother and daughter is made all the more turbulent by drug abuse in this downbeat drama from Iranian filmmakers Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab

The struggle to survive, for a generation, torn between wanting to leave its country, yet bound by blood to home.

A mother's courage, hardship, and love, in times of war. In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, Gilane escorts her pregnant daughter, Maygol, from the relative calm of their village, Espili, into war-torn Tehran to search for Maygol's husband, Rahman. The journey is arduous and what they find when they reach the capital is dismaying and frightening. Fifteen years later, as another war begins in Iraq, Gillane is at home caring for her son Ismael, who suffers from epilepsy, a byproduct of war. As she cares for him, she hopes for a visit from the doctor and from another daughter, Atefah. "Better be a dog than a mother," she says.

A number of inmates from a reformatory school are scheduled for release. As a condition for their discharge, it is specified that the younger boys should live either with their families or in government supervision centers. On the appointed date, however, Mohsen Ghaderi's parents do not show up to take their son. Another boy, meanwhile, Sohrab, an orphan, is not accepted in the government supervision centers. The film depicts the real lives of these two young boys among other inmates of the reformatory school. The past, the present and whatever is destined to happen in the future are what this film is all about. The causes of crime, the roles the family and society play, and the efforts to re-educate juvenile delinquents at reformatory school are of particular interest in the film.

In a building site in present-day Tehran, Lateef, a 17-year-old Turkish worker is irresistibly drawn to Rahmat, a young Afghan worker. The revelation of Rahmat's secret changes both their lives.

Djomeh is a young Afghan man who has come to live in Iran because of family trouble. Working as a milk boy, he encounters discrimination from the Iranian villagers and disdain from Habib, a fellow Afghani to whose trust Djomeh was given. The only person who shows any friendliness to him is his employer, who Djomeh asks to intercede for him in asking a woman from the village for her hand in marriage.

The story revolves around a blind boy named Mohammed who is released from his special school in Tehran for summer vacation. His father, shamed and burdened by Mohammed's blindness, arrives late to pick him up and then tries to convince the headmaster to keep Mohammed over the summer. The headmaster refuses, so Mohammed's father eventually takes him home.

Mehrollah is a 14-year-old boy who is forced to find a job to support his family after his father dies. He travels to the southern parts of Iran, looking for work. Upon his return to his hometown, he notices certain changes in his family.

Would God answer a letter for help?

Complications arise in a director's attempt to film a scene in Life, and Nothing more... (1992).