Good Bye

Iran / 2011 / Farsi

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

With Leyla Zareh, Fereshteh Sadreorafai, Shahab Hoseini

Noora is an Iranian woman gradually and resolutely chipping away at the concentric walls surrounding her. As the obstacles pile up, revealed one at a time, she attempts to restack the sum total of a system that is stacked against her. A debarred lawyer with dangerous connections to human rights activists, she moves through a somber Tehran of art-nouveau buildings and spartan offices, bathed in nauseating clarity, as she tries to obtain visas for her and her husband, a journalist who has been targeted for censure in the past and is hiding in some undisclosed place. While the rules of her trip abroad (arranged for the purpose of a speaking engagement) are predetermined in detail, there is no doubt that she does not mean to follow it with a return to her country.