LOCARNO 2024 Semaine de la Critique
Review: A Sisters’ Tale

by David Katz, Cineuropa
August 9, 2024

Iranian director Leila Amini films her sister, an aspiring singer, across seven years, in a country where public singing by women is banned.

The restrictions on women’s rights in Iran, and the waves of unrest against them, are certainly well known in international affairs, and also through a gladly unceasing wave of modern Iranian cinema. But the specific ban on women singing receives far less global coverage.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there have been alterations in the finer points of what’s permitted and how music overall is circulated, but women are still prohibited from singing by themselves in public. When processing this, the description “Orwellian” springs to mind.



Premiering as the opening-night film of Locarno’s Semaine de la Critique, before it jets off to Toronto (see the news), Leila Amini’s A Sisters’ Tale alights on this area of women’s resistance in Iran, one that might not have occurred to international audiences, especially given how more visceral imagery and histrionic emotions can provoke us faster. As the sole camera operator, she surveys her very sympathetic older sister Nasreen, who seeks to break free from her loveless arranged marriage of 15 years, and fulfil herself by recapturing her talent for singing. To irresponsibly paraphrase the group Talking Heads, she’s rebelling against a society wracked by the fear of music.

Seven years of real time fluidly pass in the film’s 90-minute edit, her husband Mohamed first seen shuffling around the domestic space as a silent, almost spectral presence, before he’s finally divorced and absent in the later years. This observation isn’t to identify a flaw, but Leila can only sketch their dysfunctional relationship and Nasreen’s feeling of imprisonment, without conveying it in real detail (although, of course, she already risks being invasive enough, putting their personal lives on display like this). Yet there’s an uncanny difficulty for the audience, as our own moral judgement is requested on the situation, when there’s still so little we know (and less we could probably understand), while we are able to merely empathise with Nasreen’s plight.

Another filmmaker might aim for bathos in the gap between Nasreen’s aspirations and the limitation her ability might have, but her voice, abetted by some vocal tuition that we also glimpse, is emotionally captivating, even if the symbolism of the lyrics she writes, with their elemental and religious references, might be remote to us. There are telling vignettes from Leila of the “secret” music scene that subsists however it can, from viral a cappella Instagram videos to pirate radio broadcasts, and some savvy social-media networking leading her to a session in a plush recording studio.

This is a direct, uncomplicated film, with Nasreen’s status also mirroring a more generalised female critique of patriarchal expectations, as she nervily questions devoting her life to her ten-year-old son Hamid and baby daughter Hana. Yet without losing her own individuality, she’s a more subdued reflection of the women in 2022 crowding the streets to protest against the morality police after Mahsa Amini’s murder. Nasreen’s gentler rejection of the norms is only one of the less visible ways in which Iranian women are continuing their fight.

A Sisters’ Tale is a co-production by Switzerland, France and Iran, staged by Mira Film, Docmaniacs, La Belle Film and SRF - Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen.