Viewer advice: Contains sexual violence themes

A troubled medical scholar pits herself against institutional sexism in this steely moral thriller selected for Un Certain Regard.

Bangladeshi widow Rehana Maryam Noor is a harried assistant professor who rules over both her medical students and her young daughter with the same scrupulous eye. When she learns that her superior is sexually harassing one of their trainees, she throws herself into a crusade to force an institutional response. But which will crack first: the iron walls that shield abusers or Rehana’s own rigid moral code?

Writer/director Abdullah Mohammad Saad delivers a propulsive, unsettling story of individual struggle against systemic wrongdoing in his second feature – the first Bangladeshi film to feature in the Cannes Film Festival’s official selection. With probing, claustrophobic camerawork by DOP Tuhin Tamijul and a fiercely magnetic performance from Azmeri Haque Badhon in the title role, Rehana Maryam Noor offers sharp examination of normalised injustice and the costly risks of seeking redress.

“Azmeri Haque Badhon impresses and unsettles as a woman whose pursuit of justice threatens to destroy her and those around her.” – Screen Daily