Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes 2012: Massoud Bakhshi’s A Respectable Family

A Respectable Family – Massoud Bakhshi

Buzz: This is kind of a wild card pick, coming from a first-time filmmaker and all, but it’s the only Iranian film in any Cannes section other than the new Kiarostami picture, which is shot in Japan so barely counts. To say this country is on a roll (cinematically speaking, of course) is an understatement: Certified Copy, A Separation (not to mention About Elly in 2009), and This is Not a Film have all place at or near the top of respectable top 10 lists the world over. Will Bakhshi be a huge new voice on the international platform next to his master countrymen? We’ll see.

The Gist: Arash is an Iranian academic who lives in the West. He returns to Iran to teach in Chiraz, a city far from Tehran where his mother lives. Drawn into a series of domestic and financial dramas, he is reminded of the hardships of his childhood at the start of the Iran-Iraq War in 1981. Following the death of his father and the discovery of what his ‘respectable family’ has become, he is obliged to make choices.