Left Handed
2021 · 15m · Irán
Directed by asrin Mohammadpour
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Maryam, a 38-year-old factory worker, is the head of a family of four and struggles to make ends meet. In a desperate act to provide for her family, she takes a drastic, traumatic decision related to her work — one with unforeseen consequences that leaves her facing a new and unexpected destiny.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sober, linear tragedy about a factory worker's impossible choice—formally conventional, thematically predictable, the kind of well-meaning social realism that festivals program in blocks. I'd rather watch a film that makes me uncomfortable by *how* it tells the story, not just *what* happens in it.
Mohammadpour works in the lineage of Iranian neorealism with steady compositional control and a refusal to sentimentalize Maryam's desperation; the film knows its own tradition and honors it with formal restraint.
The specificity lives in Maryam's hands—the way the camera tracks her physical labor, then holds on a single moment where her decision crystallizes not in dialogue but in how she moves her body—that's the filmmaking choice that transforms a premise about poverty into something tactile and irreversible.