Ever since Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On premiered back in 1992, movies set in cars have become the modus operandi of some of Iranian cinema’s greatest works. Director Jafar Panahi, who was once Kiarostami’s assistant, won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2015 for Taxi, in which he pretended to be a cab driver in order to scrutinize his country’s dire social situation. In 2021, Panahi’s son, Panah, made his debut with the exuberant and crowd-pleasing Hit the Road, about a family taking one last road trip together toward the Turkish border. Critical Zone (Mantagheye bohrani), the gutsy, tantalizing fourth feature from director Ali Ahmadzadeh, checks all the boxes of this quintessential Iranian genre. Critical Zone is so socially vital that the director was banned by Iranian authorities from attending its world premiere at Locarno, where it won the Golden Leopard for best film. Ahmadzadeh purposely, and cleverly, focuses on a few of the upsides of illegal drug use, further underlining the inhumanity of laws that would sentence men like Amir to death by hanging. Ahmadzadeh rather subversively critiques his country’s draconian drug policies — and its repressive social laws, especially concerning women — while demonstrating the liberating, delirious effects certain narcotics can have, especially for a young population striving to free themselves from the grip of Iran’s suffocating theocracy.
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