After Leila’s Brothers in 2022, Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee is back in competition in the 78th Cannes Film Festival with his fourth feature Woman and Child [+lee también:
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Cineuropa: Woman and Child is a very rich story, even though the main focus is clearly on Mahnaz. Where did the idea for the film come from?
Saeed Roustaee: It's a story I've heard all around me since I was a child. There are so many examples of men coming for their fiancée and in the end asking someone else to marry them. So this idea has always been there in a way and as I'm used to working on several scripts and several subjects at the same time, with new ideas all the time, one of them suddenly intrudes and it's really as if it were the pulse of my blood telling me: “make me a film, make me a film”. And so Woman and Child was born.

Is it first and foremost the story of a woman who is initially open to compromise before realising that she doesn't have to?
Exactly. It's a woman who, at a given moment, is prepared to accept a certain number of requests that are not to her personal liking, in order to be able to live with this man. But then, not only is she no longer willing to compromise, but she creates her own path, becomes an active agent of change, taking control of her own situation and that of everyone around her. Mahnaz creates change in order to save her sister and, by extension, the young Iranian generation.

There are many lies in the film. How did you want to deal with this theme?
It's more a question of concealment. Perhaps in more progressive societies, the differences between the private and public spheres are almost non-existent or, at the very least, we manage to understand from the outside what goes on inside a family. In more conservative societies, Iran included, there is a huge difference between what happens inside the home and what happens outside. For example, if you belong to a family, people will talk about others in a way that they wouldn't even dream of in public. I think this comes from the cultural behaviour of offering we have with a very codified set of courtesies. For example, if someone arrives at your house unexpectedly when you had to go out for an emergency, you do not explain what's happened or tell them to come back another time. No, you give up on the important thing you had to do and sit down, even if it means doing nothing, so as not to be rude.

Another major theme of the film is education?
Absolutely. In Iran, at school, you learn to know yourself and to hide things because you develop out of sight of your family. In the film, the son, Aliyar, hides things from his family in the same way that his mother hides things from him. The problem is that people haven't yet learnt to be honest and they're used to hiding what they think, so they tend not to be sincere. But this concealment is unhealthy. If you think, for example, as Mahnaz does, that remarrying when you already have children is a mistake, you're still going to hide that thought. And it's only when Aliyar dies that Mahnaz comes to know him because she discovers what he was hiding, and by knowing him, she comes to know herself more and more.

What were your main directing intentions?
The most important element was that the characters were always moving. When they have to sit down, it's the camera that moves so that it remains natural. For this film, as for my previous ones, what was really important for me in spaces as intimate as homes is that they are always very small spaces where the characters can see each other all the time from a short distance. They obviously don't see each other in wide shots and that means, because it's not just a question of looking, knowing everyone very intimately, understanding everything about each of them, their secrets. It is for this reason, and to give this sense of intimacy and knowledge, that inside the family flat we always see the characters in medium or close-up.