Terrestrial Verses

★★★★ “ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT AND PROVOCATIVE FILMS TO EMERGE FROM IRAN RECENTLY. Intrepid and original. A scathing critique of the poisoned power relations in the Islamic Republic, relations that corrupt interactions by people at every level of Iranian society.”
– Godfrey Cheshire, RogerEbert.com
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“CRITIC’S PICK. GRIPPING. Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, TERRESTRIAL VERSES operates with a cumulative effect…what’s best about [the film] is its discipline, the way it draws the viewer into the story as more than just an observer…When you don’t have much power, then the temptation to lord it over those who have even less is a strong one. Asgari and Khatami seem to know this well, and manage to make TERRESTRIAL VERSES into something approaching a thriller.”
– Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
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In Tehran, a new father seeks to register the name (insufficiently Islamic, he is told) of his newborn son; a 20-something rideshare driver caught on camera without a hijab attempts to retrieve her impounded car; a man with poem tattoos applies for a driver’s license; an elderly woman pleads with the police for the return of her beloved dog. This taut, pulsing drama — composed of nine deceptively simple, single-take vignettes, each featuring an ordinary Iranian citizen facing an unseen bureaucrat — brilliantly incarnates the absurdity, hypocrisy, and seeds of defiance that belie authoritarian control.