The Frame
The Apple
Two sisters kept locked inside their home for their whole childhood step into the street for the first time — and the ordinary world of sunlight, ice cream and a ball becomes a paradise you had forgotten to notice.
Before anything else
What it does to you
The girls' feelings arrive through their bodies — bewildered delight at touching ice, chasing a ball — never through speeches, so their joy and their deprivation land in the same instant. That joy is the trap: their unself-conscious wonder makes what they were denied register as a slow bruise rather than a sharp blow. The film offers only partial release and leaves the wound open, the image of two children meeting sunlight refusing to let you go.
Watch for
Things to notice
Not a summary. What the film keeps returning to, so you can see it when it comes.
Sacred Routine
Ice cream, a ball, a mirror, a boy on the street — mundane encounters are filmed with a gravity that makes the ordinary world feel like a paradise the viewer had forgotten to notice.
Facing Yourself
A mirror given to the girls becomes a recurring prop through which self-recognition and the discovery of personhood is staged — they see themselves as subjects for what may be the first time.
What's Shown, What's Hidden
The contrast between the dark interior of the house and the flooded Tehran sunlight outside is the film's persistent visual argument about what confinement withholds.
The Signature
Five of twenty readings. Sign in to open all of them, with the sentence behind each one.
Plot DNA
Time Flow
Power & Politics
Story Threads
Violence With Purpose
World Size
Rhymes With
A double bill: three films that keep this one company, and one that answers it from the far side. Read across all twenty readings at once, never a genre tag.
2016 · Kleber Mendonça Filho
Aquarius
They share Power & Politics, and diverge on Time Flow.
Step sideways
1974 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
They share Grey Area, and diverge on Light vs. Dark.
Step sideways
2018 · Hirokazu Koreeda
Shoplifters
They share Time Flow, and diverge on Light vs. Dark.
Step sideways
1990 · Martin Scorsese
Goodfellas
They split hardest on Power & Politics.
Step sideways
Before you press play
Questions people ask
- Is this a documentary?
- Almost — the real family plays itself, restaging events that had only just happened in the very house where they happened, which gives the film its startling, uninvented charge.
- Why is the ordinary world made to feel so extraordinary?
- Because we are seeing it through girls encountering it for the first time. The film borrows their eyes, and suddenly ice cream and sunlight look like the marvels they always were.
The Ledger
- Country
- Iran
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