The title of this film (which I saw at the Leeds Film Festival - http://www.leedsfilm.com/ ) was different on screen to how it was advertised, on the prints it was called Mina from the Silent City, which says more about the film but I do prefer the new title. It is the story of a recently divorced Iranian doctor who has been living in Germany for 33 years and returns to Iran to perform an operation on a relative of an old family friend.

First and foremost this is an extremely well made film, it is very smooth, the editing is fluid and the cinematography recalls that of modern Olivier Assayas and Anthony Minghella films (specifically Clean and Breaking and Entering). The acting is uniformly excellent - Shabaz Noshir plays Dr. Parsa with a lot of restraint and melts into the film, allowing everything and everyone else to catch the eye. His performance is the rock on which the film is built on but there are lovely supporting turns from Ezzatolah Entezami as the elderly musician who knew Parsa's deceased father and Saber Abbar as his hilarious driver (a scene with him explaining the intricacies and subtleties of beeping your horn whilst driving was a particular treat).

There are some very interesting themes being explored in this film, Parsa returns to an Iran he doesn't recognise at all and is clearly still hurting at being forced to leave by his father when he was only 15 years old. The resentment has extended to him being apathetic towards his father's estate (which paid for his education abroad) and he is more interested in searching out an old playmate Mina (hence the original title) than getting his father's palm groves up and running again after an earthquake devasted the city three years before. This is a man who never wanted to leave but equally never returned, even when his home was in most need of his help.

There are brief flashbacks throughout the film of Parsa playing with Mina and two other boys as children and for the most part they are handled like the ones in Cache - intermittent and hinting - yet they don't provide the conclusion that the flashbacks in that film did. In some ways this is a character study, in others it seems like a love letter to the past - we see Parsa seeking Mina not knowing if she's dead or alive or married or not, we see him and his friends attempting to fix the wells to rejuvinate the former glories of the groves, there's lots of allegorical ideas being explored to make this as intellectually interesting as it is aesthetically pleasing.

If I were to have a criticism I'd suggest that it does tend to drag a bit in the third quarter and that  for all the ideas introduced they are left open a tad too much and don't come together to produce a truly satisfying conclusion to all of the plot strands. That said though this is a very good film that I fear will get next to no distribution here. I'm very glad I saw it at this festival because I can't see how else I would get to, so if you ever come across this be it online or somehow at your local arthouse, or like me at a Festival within a reachable distance then I'd certainly recommend seeing this because it has so much going for it and is so accessible to a western audience both thematically and in its execution.