“The story of a society in a collective coma” is the stated theme of Bahman Farmanara's sophisticated portrait of a doctor-and a nation-in crisis. The film won Best Picture at the Fajr Film Festival and Best Actor for its star Reza Kianian. “There are wounds in life that eat your soul away,” quotes Kianian's character, a gynecologist. The doctor encounters his society's hidden diseases-heroin addiction, prostitution, AIDS, and overpopulation- but it is his emotional guilt as a father, son, and lover that truly gnaws away at his soul, haunting him with spiritual doubt and dreams of fallen angels and destiny's unwoven threads. Farmanara uses the patients' ills and the doctor's melancholia to critique a society that surrounds and drowns. But he refreshingly moves beyond the literal with metaphysical digressions and poetic musings, where dreams and references to classical Persian art and poetry offer greater solace than any comatose reality.

A House Built on Water is repeated on Friday, January 17.