Hossein deploys all of the legal and economic levers of coercion to try to control Shayda. Both Shayda and Hossein came to Australia from Iran on scholarships, but the regime has cancelled Shayda’s scholarship. We don’t find out why – perhaps because she has filed for divorce – but we do know that this leaves her without any way to support herself and her daughter. If Hossein is successful in getting Mona out of Australia, the court in Iran will automatically grant him sole custody. In an attempt to force her return to him, Hossein taunts Shayda with the laws in Iran that reinforce the rights of husbands and that punish any woman who strays: he says that when they get back to Tehran, ‘you know what they will do to you, they’ll kill you’, and he sets out to try to build a case that she has been with another man. Shayda’s family tries to persuade her to return to him, despite his violence – her mother says ‘this is your fate, and you cannot change it’ – and in Melbourne she is ostracised by some in her Iranian-Australian community because she has left her husband.

Leah Purcell as Joyce, Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Shayda, Eve Morey as Lara, and Jillian Nguyen as Vi (photograph by Jane Zhang).

For the director and her team, it was important to balance this darkness with light and hope. Shayda’s determination to save herself and her daughter, and her growing sense of agency, are bolstered by support from the other women in the women’s shelter and from the refuge worker Joyce (Leah Purcell). Niasari draws on insider knowledge to depict the warmth and solidarity between the women. She says that she first tasted freedom at the age of five, when she and her mother sought refuge in a women’s shelter. The script was adapted from an unpublished memoir by her mother, and then fictionalised, and the director says the film draws a ‘fine line between fact and fiction’.

Niasari was also committed to wresting the image of Iran away from the typical current affairs focus. In Shayda, the long reach of the theocratic government and repressive social conservatism rub up against the pleasures of celebrating Persian culture in the diaspora – traditions of food, storytelling, poetry, music, dance, and communal rituals. The director says that re-enacting these traditions with their Iranian friends in Melbourne ‘kept my mother and I buoyant through those difficult times … for all second-generation and exiles, it’s so important to have that connection to your identity, to your home’.

These joys sustain Shayda and Mona, infused as they are with the sensory nostalgia that haunts those living in diaspora: the strangeness of celebrating the Nowruz spring festival (Persian New Year) when there is no sign of spring; the memory traces that linger around childhood fables, multicoloured mulberry sweets, and the festive goldfish bought at the Persian market.

Shayda talks of ‘a shedding, a letting go’, as she adapts to her new homeland. Many viewers will identify with this affective world of migration, especially when return is out of the question. The film manages to encompass this intimate territory of cultural identity and transformation, freedom and loss, set against the grief of families split across continents, the anxious process of applying for residency, and the claustrophobia of being part of a small community that at times tries to enforce oppressive norms of the home country. It’s a nuanced study of the emotional terrain of migration and exile, with all its ambivalence, and an exploration of the complex hybrid identities that are so prevalent in contemporary Australia but so lacking in much of our cinema. Shayda joins a small number of recent Australian films grounded in this cultural diversity.

Across the film industry, writers, directors, producers, and distributors like to describe a film as a ‘universal story’, as if the goal is to put everything into a melting pot and boil it down to a cinematic Esperanto. Influential writing guru Lee Gutkind contests this glib model. For him, it’s specificity that ‘packs a punch’: the more detailed and specific the texture of a story, the more people it can connect with. Niasari speaks of the millions of women across the world who share Shayda’s story but it is the inflections of this experience in the finely drawn local context that give the film its power.

As testimony to the significant role of cinema in forging and negotiating cultural identities in the diaspora, the filmmakers speak of the enthusiasm of Melbourne’s Iranian community for the film project and the enormous logistical support they offered, ranging from volunteering as extras to offering rehearsal spaces and helping set up the Nowruz festival scenes.

For Niasari, growing up in Melbourne, Iranian cinema played a big part in developing her cultural identity and a sense of her culture of origin. She singles out the films of renowned Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi as a key influence: ‘seeing these films, I felt a connection that transcended all the darkness that I had heard about.’ When Niasari was the only Australian to be accepted into a ten-day workshop for emerging filmmakers with Kiarostami, in Barcelona in 2015, it was the fulfilment of a long-term dream to meet and work with him.

Shayda pivots around the relationship between Shayda and Mona. In the way this relationship is depicted, there are traces of this Iranian cinema heritage. Even though Mona is at times scared and suspicious of Hossein, when she is playing and dancing with her mother she might almost be framed with an iris and filmed through a lens smeared with Vasoline to soften the image. There is a feeling reminiscent of the utopian visions of the innocence of children in Iranian cinema (Niasari cites Panahi’s The White Balloon as a key influence in her childhood). The relationship between mother and daughter is also idealised as an image of maternal devotion.

These generic traces pull against the strong realist depiction of Shayda’s predicament. They also give the film an emotional intensity that has doubtless resonated with audiences. Since its release, the film has won the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival, opened Melbourne International Film Festival, been selected for the Toronto International Film Festival, been nominated as the official Australian entry in the Best International Film category of this year’s Academy Awards, and won Western Australia’s lucrative CinefestOZ Film Prize.

Osamah Sami as Hossein and Selina Zahednia as Mona (photograph by Nicola Bell).

The Iranian diaspora, both Australian and international, provided a wealth of talent for the production, in front of and behind the camera. French-Iranian actor, producer, and director Zar Amir Ebrahim (Shayda) won the Cannes Film Festival award for best actress in 2022 for Holy Spider, among many other awards; actor, writer, and comedian Osamah Sami (Hossein), has won numerous awards for co-writing and starring in Ali’s Wedding; the team auditioned across Australia to find a young Farsi-speaking girl to play Mona and were blown away by the emotional intelligence of Selina Zahednia, who took the role. Leah Purcell, Jillian Nguyen, Mojean Aria, and Rina Mousavi complement this accomplished cast.

One critic has recently written in a major Australian outlet that Shayda ‘explores wounded, and fragile masculinity’. Following the lead offered by Anna Funder in Wifedom, it is not hard to trace the multiple erasures that lead to this description: turning a blind eye to Hossein’s sense of entitlement (‘You are still my wife’); downplaying the rage and menace – the grabbing and prodding – barely contained in every interaction, until it erupts in a life-threatening physical attack; ignoring Hossein’s absolute certainty that his right to control his wife and daughter will be upheld by the law; and somehow sweeping under the carpet the violent assault that led Shayda to flee in the first place and live in fear for her life.

Hossein is the victim, the wounded party here? Really?

More unfathomable than these erasures is how anyone could miss the fact that the core of the film – its narrative arc – belongs to its central character, Shayda. Niasari describes Shayda as a film about female empowerment: ‘I grew up seeing my mum being this brave, courageous woman … now the whole world knows about the bravery of Iranian women. I never imagined a day would come where a women-led revolution would take hold in Iran as it is today. I am in awe of the millions of mothers and daughters fighting for these freedoms. I dedicate this film to the brave women and girls of Iran.’

Shayda (Madman Entertainment) opens in cinemas nationally on 5 October 2023.