An exile in France since the age of 15, Arash Saafi has been enticed back to Iran after a 22-year absence. However, his semester as a guest lecturer at shiraz university brings him face to face with the realities he had fled: his family, corrupt and despised; his haunting memories of the Iran-Iraq war; and his country’s increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracy. In a Respectable Family, Bakhshi films Iran as a nation under siege from both without and within, alienating its people through terror and corruption as it lurches between historical, psychological and social violence. Uncompromising in its harrowing portrayal yet refusing to abandon hope, Bakhshi’s striking feature debut, which screened at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, has something of the suspense and humanism of Asghar Farhadi’s a Separation as well as a touch of the defiance of Bahman Ghobadi’s Persian Cats. A Respectable Family deftly captures the complexity of a country where the line between private and public seems irretrievably blurred. A fresh surge of vitality from Iranian cinema, courageous and refreshingly clear-sighted.