The Apple

Two girls locked in the home for eleven years finally get a chance to go out and play. Like many recent films from Iran, this one has a simple plot line, light humour, a humanitarian streak, and resonance due to its use of metaphor and rather complex themes. The film starts with concerned neighbours signing a petition for social workers to investigate a home where their blind mother and out-of-work father have locked up two girls for eleven years. Social workers “rescue” the (now severely intellectually and socially stunted) girls then give them back to their parents. What follows is an initiation period in which a social worker and the father have a seriocomic encounter whereby he gets a kind of comeuppance and the girls venture into the neighbourhood and begin to make friends despite their lack of social skills. What’s most harrowing about the film is that it’s based on a real life event and the principal characters play themselves, and it’s directed by an 18 year-old Iranian woman. Samira Makhmalbaf was able to shoot this film with film stock left over from her father’s (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) film “Sokhout” (1998). In Farsi with English subtitles. Cast includes Ghorban Ali Naderi, Azizeh Mohamadi, Massoumeh Naderi, Zahra Naderi and Zahra Saghrisaz.