Kids
should be able to be kids, but Sadaf never stood a chance. She feels pressure
from both sides of the social spectrum: her severe Islamist school
administrators and her loutish, drug dealing father. The last thing she needs
from either of them is unnecessary stress on a test day, but that is what they
give her in Sonia K. Hadad’s short film Exam,
which won the Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Sadaf’s
father often uses her as a courier or his drug deals. It disgusts her, but she
usually just acquiesces. This fateful morning, the old man has volunteers her
services, without asking her first. Sadaf happens to have an important exam at
school today and she is already running late. She is not happy about it, but
she doesn’t have much choice. However, it is not the people making low-end drug
transactions who represent a serious danger to Sadaf—it is the busybody
moralizers who run her school.
Exam is a few seconds
shy of 15 minutes, but it gets acutely tense, awfully quickly. It definitely
follows in the tradition of Persian films that depict extreme moral dilemmas,
so aptly demonstrated by the films of Asghar Farhadi and Massoud Bakhshi’s Yalda, a Night of Forgiveness, which
also stars young Sadaf Asgari and screened at his year’s Sundance.
It
is easy to get why the Jury singled out Asgari’s work in Exam, because her fierce performance takes her to some pretty
extreme places that she fully commits to. This is a harrowing portrait of youth
(perhaps lost) that is unlike anything you will see in a decade of CW
programming. Ironically, it makes Asgari work as the young, wronged “temporary”
wife in Yalda, even more poignant,
because she looks so natural and convincing as a fourteen or fifteen-year-old
here.
The
premise of Exam could very well
support a feature treatment, so it is impressive how efficiently Hadad boils it
down to its dramatic essentials. This a bracing film that unflinchingly
reflects the day-to-day challenges facing young women and the younger
generation of students in contemporary Iran. Very highly recommended, Exam next screens this Friday (2/7)
during the upcoming Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, after winning the Special
Short Film Jury Award for Acting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
