Reeling from a tragic event, a widowed mother swears revenge on the men who’ve wronged her.

Forty-year-old widow Mahnaz has her hands full. She’s juggling her work as a nurse, raising two children and spending time with her boyfriend Hamid, who has proposed marriage. If that wasn’t enough, her rebellious teenage son Aliyar has just been suspended from school after one prank too many. On the day that Hamid’s parents visit to meet Mahnaz so they can approve of the wedding, tragedy strikes, upending Mahnaz’s precariously balanced life. Her unspeakable grief twists into incandescent rage as she resolves to punish everyone responsible for her pain – by whatever means necessary.

Following in the footsteps of his Iranian contemporaries Asghar Farhadi and Jafar Panahi, director Saeed Roustaee – imprisoned for six months for making his previous film, Leila’s Brothers (MIFF 2022) – adds another scathing critique of Iran’s oppressive patriarchal structures to his growing oeuvre of morally knotty social dramas. Premiering at Cannes, his fourth feature sees him reunite with Just 6.5 (MIFF 2020) star Parinaz Izadyar, whose formidable performance as the fury-filled Mahnaz is supported by regular Roustaee collaborator Payman Maadi as the roguish Hamid. Deftly playing with expectations and proceeding with taut, ever-escalating plotting, Woman and Child is an unstoppable force whose wrath seeks only a just resolution.

“A carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama … manages to be both incredibly tense and deeply stirring in its depiction of a woman coping with unimaginable pain.” – Time Out