After an eight-year hiatus from feature filmmaking, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad returns with this intimate portrait of the interwoven lives of its working-class characters. A taxi driver runs into a long-lost family friend; his mother appeals to this friend for funds to release her other son from prison. The mother rides in a van of workers protesting the loss of their jobs, and one man’s illiteracy leads him to make a rash assumption about his wife. In this circle of interconnected souls stands a filmmaker, whose difficulty in gaining clearance to document these lives may well parallel Bani-Etemad’s long journey to finishing the film. 

—Diana Li