Sounds interesting and hugely significant too.
I went to see Iranian film Hit the Road in the summer, but things got in the way and I never wrote it up.
This is a critically acclaimed road movie, written and directed by Panah Panahi (the son of director and political prisoner Jafar Panahi), and released in 2021, which features a loving, eccentric family as they make their way across country. (Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian has interestingly noted that an entirely new genre has effectively evolved in Iranian cinema, comprising films “shot semi-covertly in a car”, as a tactic to avoid state interference.)
The family is made up of two parents, chain-smoking father Kosro (played by Hassan Madjooni, and nursing a broken leg), the mother (played by Pantea Panahiha), adult, taciturn son Farid (Amin Simiar), his mischievous, much younger brother (played by Rayan Sarlak) and their sick dog. The success of Sarlak’s naturalistic performance really stands out…
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Almost the first thing I learned in English 101 at Melbourne University, was that the English novel has its origins in morality plays. And with apologies to Proper Academics who know what they’re talking about when it comes to Iris Murdoch, I reckon The Italian Girl is not one of IM’s ‘bad novels’ as Kenneth Trodd would have it in the New Left Review from 1964. His review was paywalled, so I could only read a bit of it, sufficient to know that he took A Dim View of this novel, describing it as a genre between Green Penguins and old Gothic. I think that The Italian Girl has its origins in morality plays and a Shakespearean comedy of errors. The novel masquerades as melodrama and it’s not meant to be realism. Rather, it uses a modern day quest for inheritance and identity to mask its framework of temptation, sin…
penwithlit 
