Téhéran

The name Massoud Bakhshi may not sound familiar. However, this Iranian director's second feature film could well establish him as a major player on the world cinema scene. After tackling the cultural divide between Europe and Iran through the story of an academic in A respectable family (2012), Bakhshi was inspired by an Iranian TV program called «Honeymoon». This allowed individuals sentenced to death to be pardoned by the victim's family live on air. Modelled on The Voice, the audience could pick up their phones and judge the sincerity of the criminal's act of repentance. While the filmmaker presents us with a world that we will inevitably read as dystopian, Iranian codes and practices are discovered through the prism of reality TV, giving us access to a cultural reality that is invisible in cinema.