Watch Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness with film summary and movie review
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Under Iranian law, the perpetrators of most violent crimes in the country face execution (“an eye for an eye”), but the judicial system also provides an opportunity for forgiveness. If the victim’s family agrees to forgive the convicted for their crime, instead of death, that person would receive reduced prison time and be responsible for paying a “price of blood” debt. This whole setup has been adapted for Iranian reality TV: For 11 years, the wildly popular show “Honey Moon” aired during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and gathered donations from citizens—totaling in the millions—that helped pay off prisoners’ blood debts.
That system serves as Bahkshi’s inspiration for “Yalda,” in which Maryam (Sadaf Asgari), a young woman in her 20s, is strong-armed by her mother into appearing on the show “Joy of Forgiveness” on the Iranian winter solstice holiday Yalda. The widely watched “Joy of Forgiveness” is convicted murderer Maryam’s one chance to avoid being executed for the killing of her husband, a decades-older ad agency executive. If Maryam’s story resonates, she could stay alive. But she has many people to convince: not just the show’s producer, host, and control room, but also its studio audience, the 30 million viewers watching at home, and, most importantly, her husband’s only child and Maryam’s former friend Mona (Behnaz Jafari).
“Yalda” is such a tightly contained film, with nearly everything occurring within the reality show’s set or at a nearby traffic stop, that a sense of claustrophobia is present from the beginning. Adding to that tension is how often the characters’ memories and explanations conflict with one another: Maryam’s mother has a different understanding of her daughter’s relationship with her husband than Maryam herself, while Maryam and Mona spar over how the former became ingratiated into the latter’s family. Baked into Bahkshi’s script is a consideration of Iranian social dynamics, and the cast’s naturalistic performances make clear the deep divisions in economic classes, in particular between Iranians who stay in the country and those who are able to leave for new lives in Europe, Canada, or the United States. The ensemble is tapping into real mistrust between certain groups of Iranian citizens and how contrastingly they view work, marriage, and family, and that wariness leaves an impression.
But all of this comes down to Asgari and Jafari, who are summarily exceptional. The point of “Yalda” is that we might never really understand why another person makes the choices they do, and the two actresses each put their own spin on that specific frustration. Asgari’s wide eyes and youthful features underscore the girlishness that makes her plight so upsetting, but the details of how her husband died are shocking to then reconcile. Jafari well conveys Mona’s standoffishness and disgust at even having to appear on the “Joy of Forgiveness,” but she also makes us feel the deep pain of losing her father. The situation in which these women find themselves is an impossible one to parse, and the power of “Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness” is in how much empathy it wrings from us while still making us complicit in their plight.
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Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness (2020)
89 minutes
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