Review of The Apple

Like many recent films from Iran this one has a simple plot line, light humor, and a humanitarian streak that is rarely seen in American films. Yet it too has a resonance due to its use of metaphor and to a rather complex theme. The film starts with concerned neighbors signing a petition for social workers to investigate a home where their blind mother and out-of-work father have locked up two girls for eleven years. Social workers "rescue" the (now slightly autistic) girls then give them back to their parents. What follows is an initiation period in which a social worker and the father have a seriocomic encounter in which he gets a kind of comeuppance and the girls go out into the neighborhood and begin to make friends despite their lack of social skills. What's most harrowing about the film is that it's based on a real life event and the principal characters play themselves. What's more it's directed by an 18 year-old Iranian woman. Highly recommended.