2012, Fiction feature, 86 min./ Iran – France

Ziba is an upper-class housewife from Teheran who apparently has her life in order. Yet every day she is exhausted and feels paralysed in her daily routine. She can’t make it clear to anyone what exactly is wrong with her. When the silent Ziba and her irritated husband make a stopover on their way to the sea, they lose each other. Ziba literally gets stuck in a recently completed building owned by her husband. She kills time listening to a father and his rebellious daughter, who confides some very personal things to her, unasked. Director Bani Khoshnoudi does not so much make a portrait of Ziba, but shows through her character the suffocation experienced every day by many Iranians. Ziba is more a metaphor for the general state of oppression, alienation and imposed silence in today’s Iran, which is also referred to in the fragments of propaganda on TV and radio. Ziba results from the Cinéfondation Writing Residency at the Cannes Film Festival.

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