Namo

This feature debut revolves around Bakhtiyar, a teacher who is transferred to a city in the Kurdish-speaking region of Iran. Together with his family, he tries to settle into his new environment. Yet social control makes his life increasingly difficult, as he continually refuses to behave with the opportunism expected of him in nearly every situation. When a car with a driver and a passenger appears in his street one day and remains parked there almost the whole time, his anxiety grows. All the neighbours think that it is some sort of surveillance operation focused on Bakhtiyar. Rumours fly. Has he done something wrong? Is it dangerous to socialise with him? A dynamic slowly develops from which the protagonist is unable to escape. Nader Saeivar and his co-screenwriter Jafar Panahi initially seem bound to keen everyday observations and the parameters of realistic story-telling, before these start to dissolve into something larger and more radical: a parable about paranoia, rumours and the helplessness of the individual within a repressive system. (Berlinale)