Under the Shadow

Tehran during the War of the Cities in the late 1980s, with missiles hitting the city and a djinn in the apartment block.

Shideh has been barred from resuming her medical studies because of her political activity before the revolution. Her husband is conscripted. She is left in a building that is emptying, with a daughter, a taped-up window and a fever.

Babak Anvari makes the two threats indistinguishable on purpose: the state has already taken her career, her mobility and her right to leave the building without a covering, and the supernatural is simply one more thing arriving from outside that she cannot argue with.

The sequence where she runs into the street is the film's best idea and it is not about the djinn at all.

Shot in Jordan, in Persian, and submitted by the United Kingdom for the foreign-language Oscar.