IFFR 2024 review: Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others (Farshad Hashemi)

“The film can stand on its own because of its inventive, if sometimes too clever, storytelling and two fine performances at its heart.”

A simple yet deceptively layered story, Farshad Hashemi’s Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others is a confident debut that would perhaps go unnoticed if it weren’t for the way it subverts Iranian censorship laws. Shot in the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini, the film shows several women including the lead actress without a hijab, an act that flies in the face of the aforementioned laws. This hasn’t gone without notice, as the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a strong statement (without directly naming it) after the film was shown in Cannes’ Marché du Film. That alone makes Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others an interesting entry in Iran’s long history of subversive cinema, but even without the ‘scandal’ the film can stand on its own because of its inventive, if sometimes too clever, storytelling and two fine performances at its heart.

Single life suits 30-something Mahboubeh (Mahboubeh Gholami), or so she thinks. But a repressed trauma from her past is at the base of a solitude that feels like loneliness. Her clearly defined life and her boundaries are turned upside down when she rents out her apartment for a week to a film crew, who intend to use her place as the set of a short film about a failing marriage. Suddenly she is confronted with people in her backyard, her kitchen, her bedroom. She finds herself in argument after argument with Farshad, the film’s producer (a role played by Hashemi himself), because of the crew’s carelessness around her stuff. What is most affecting her though is the story of the film-within-a-film itself, which stirs up memories of a past she finds difficult to reconcile.

The way Hashemi folds the film’s reality, Mahboubeh’s history, and the short film’s story into each other has emotional heft, but does exude an air of writerly cleverness more than of an authentic exploration of the central character’s emotional world. A scene in which the actors in the short have trouble convincingly crying on camera is followed by a personal tête-à-tête between them away from the set that truly moves them to tears, and you can’t help admiring the writing but wondering where the connection with Mahboubeh’s story is. Her dilemma as a sculptor who has trouble shaping her own life is also a tad too obvious. The neatness of the screenplay’s intricacies takes away from what, at its heart, is a beautifully simple story about a woman being forced to come to grips with her past.

The fact that the film was shot during the rise of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement in the wake of Amini’s death instinctively makes you look for commentary, but Hashemi only hints at it. The encroaching on a woman’s life, in this case by the film’s crew, may in some ways reflect the oppressiveness of Iranian culture on its women, but Mahboubeh slowly gets into the groove of life amidst people again and sees the positives of it. The core of her trauma is both a dysfunctional relationship in her past, much like the one portrayed in the short film, as well as the death of her father at a young age, but certainly the former isn’t given a clear resolution.

Despite these criticisms Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others is a film that captivates because Hashemi’s writing is well-constructed, his mise-en-scène is clear and his use of it to connect scenes together is remarkably elegant, and both Gholami and the director himself are very convincing as the film’s two central characters. As a debut this shows promise, although the Ministry of Culture’s position on the film may sadly hinder Hashemi’s work and nip his career in the bud. For that alone Me, Maryam, the Children and 26 Others deserves support from the world’s festival circuit.