The Sealed Soil

The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman, Marva Nabili’s THE SEALED SOIL chronicles the resistance of a young woman (Flora Shabavis) to her forced marriage, a defiance quickly misinterpreted by her family as demonic possession. Breathtaking in its directorial sophistication and restraint and unblinking in its critique of institutionalized misogyny, this too-long-underseen masterstroke of world cinema stands alongside Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN both in its formal rigor and its quietly radical vision of female rebellion.