Nargess

Nargess comes as a surprise mainly for its exceptionally honest look at characters who live outside strict Islamic law–Director Bani-etemad, on her fourth feature film, uses the gangster genre to tell the tragic tale of a love triangle. Afagh is an aging thief who has lost her beauty and is in danger of losing her rakish young lover, Adel. When Adel meets Nargess, the angelic daughter of a poor family, he resolves to break with his old life and go straight, but finding an honest job proves too hard, and he goes back to the old gang for one last burglary–Banietemad pushes the Iranian censorship code to the limit, managing to make her outsider characters believable and moving. -- Deborah Young, Variety.