Abbas Kiarostami protégé Ahmad Bahrami’s second feature, which won the Orizzonti Award for Best Film at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, is a dreamlike expedition to a remote Iranian factory.

The Wasteland depicts the mounting tensions among the ethnically diverse workers of a crumbling, archaic brick manufacturing plant seemingly removed from civilisation. The story focuses on 40-year-old Lotfollah, who has lived his entire life within the building and acts as a mediator between the workers and their boss.

Masterfully assembling a series of slow-burning, Rashomon-like vignettes, Bahrami – whose own father worked in an industrial factory for 30 years – lends dignity to the workers’ plight as the brickworks faces foreclosure. In turn, cinematographer Masoud Amini Tirani’s hypnotic, slow-panning takes and enigmatic looping shots give this black-and-white masterpiece’s characters the sense of being trapped in a reverie.

“A rare gem … and a story so tightly focused, it’s almost a mythology of its own.” – Vanity Fair