Director: Nadereh Sadat Serki
Writer: Nadereh Sadat Serki
Cast: Javad Ghamati, Mohammad Seddighimehr
Running time: 20mins
Film festivals are expensive – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult.
Stories told by artists working on a shoe-string budget, or who are hit by censorship, or subjected to international sanctions, still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a sixth season.
Over this most recent run of matinees, IFL will be showcasing work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free and easy communication of their artistic or political visions.
The fifth film in this series comes from Iranian writer-director Nadereh Sadat Serki. Claimant is a chilling story of the legal and social repression of women – and the institutional defence of rapists by the patriarchal order of modern Iran.
The film is largely a one-to-one conversation between a lawyer and his client, who says he is worried that a child he has sexually abused is about to go to the authorities. The grotesquely assured lawyer reels off an extensive list of reasons why the case is “nothing to worry about” from legal precedents that require survivors to accuse their abusers within two years of a crime, to social constraints, such as familial shame.
The scene, and the performance of Mohammad Seddighimehr as the lawyer, are enough to make your skin crawl as it is. His utter indifference to what he is saying, the impacts the way the law is set out will have on countless lives, and his unflinching, black-hearted smirk speak to a chilling confidence that the way things are suit him very well. But what pushes the moment from unsettling to horrific, is the incursion of ‘normal life’ into the frame.
Pausing the meeting to take a call from home, the lawyer deals lovingly with some petty squabble between his son and daughter – before putting the phone down to resume his lecture on the virtues of a legal system which has essentially made prosecuting sexual abuse impossible. He does not miss a beat – and the ease with which he transitions between the façade of caring parent to ardent defender of rapists shows us a mind and body capable of countenancing unfathomable acts of cruelty, without second thought. This is a chilling reminder that the worst, most effective monsters, hide behind masks of normality, and respectability.
The tone and pace of the scene shifts heavily in the second half, when the director unveils a relatively effective twist. It might have been better to slowly draw out the coming reveal, rather than suddenly deliver it in a way that leaves the actors with nowhere else to go with a quarter of the run-time left, but still, this is an extremely effective piece of tightly-scripted drama, which will leave audiences with plenty of food for thought as the credits role. Particularly as, in the director’s statement accompanying the film, she notes the film is “based on my own personal experience”.
As with all our previous Saturday Matinees, the film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 8th of February, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. You can give it your own score out of five there! As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE25 to access the film.