‘Without Permission’ review: An exiled filmmaker returns to Iran in Hassan Nazer’s bold docudrama

Dir/scr: Hassan Nazer. Iran/UK. 2025. 80 minutes.  

With out Permission marks a return to Iran for UK-based Iranian filmmaker Hassan Nazer – return from exile being a major theme on this story of an Iranian émigré director (Behrouz Sebt Rasoul) going again to his nation to make a movie. Confronting issues of storytelling within the face of sociopolitical repression, it follows within the footsteps of fellow Iranian film-makers comparable to Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, who additionally use advanced narrative methods to avoid taboos and restrictions.

Doesn’t fairly break recent floor however addresses questions of freedom

Paying evident homage to its precursors, With out Permission doesn’t fairly break recent floor however addresses questions of freedom as they relate to new political pressures in Iran, and to a brand new era. Competing in Busan, the movie ought to appeal to consideration throughout the vary of area of interest shops, following the excessive profile of Nazer’s 2022 characteristic Winners.

We first meet the fictional filmmaker, identified solely because the Director, driving by way of a starkly stunning rocky terrain with a younger girl, his manufacturing assistant (Setareh Fahari). The imposing vistas, with the automotive within the far distance, echo photos from Kiarostami (notably The Wind Will Carry Us), to whom the movie is devoted. 

The vacation spot is an unspecified locale with a darkened cellar area, the place the Director movies interviews with some 20 youngsters whose responses are actual and unscripted. The youngsters are of varied ages, ranging roughly from six to early adolescence; the questions he asks are usually about their goals for the longer term, particularly about how they see love, and relationships between the sexes. A recurrent interlude encompasses a younger boy and lady, each wearing white as if for a marriage, in a discipline of yellow flowers – a picture with an unavoidable ring of kitsch preciosity.

However any romantic idealism implicit on this picture or within the interviews contrasts sharply with the impression given of precise gender politics in Iran. A separate strand entails a person (Mehdi Mehri) complaining to a choose off-screen in regards to the state of his marriage. Later, the person and his spouse each seem earlier than this authority, the girl constantly silenced till she succeeds in speaking to a feminine choose.

Different interludes contain the taking part in of conventional devices round a cave mouth, and it takes some time for the movie’s varied strands to knit collectively. Largely, nonetheless, the movie’s substance lies within the interviews with the kids – all showing, a caption notes, with settlement from their dad and mom.

Throughout the movie’s fictional construction, the kids signify an irreducible core of authenticity; it’s laborious to not be charmed and sometimes stunned by their responses, a few of which relate to their willingness or in any other case to behave briefly romantic dialogues staged by the Director. Some charismatic personalities emerge – together with one younger lady who firmly attests to strict Islamic ideas and one other older lady who’s sharp-witted, articulate and ebulliently in her ingredient earlier than the digital camera. 

However the questioning itself is much less convincing as delivered by Rasoul (himself a director, his movies together with 2023’s Melody), whose insistent, incantatory monotone makes him appear extra an inquisitor determine than an empathetic interlocutor prone to put the children comfortable. And, whereas social realities in Iran clearly restrict the sorts of questions it’s attainable to ask, there appears to be one thing coyly uncomfortable in regards to the emphasis on romance – as if fond grownup fantasies about youngsters’s aspirations are being imposed on these youngsters, somewhat than their being inspired to disclose what they actually care about. Moreover, the fast modifying of the kids’s responses doesn’t enable anyone topic or practice of thought to yield actual perception into both their personalities or opinions.

The movie does, nonetheless, tackle a better urgency in its remaining third, because the Director’s venture encounters severe obstacles, and we ultimately uncover the connection between the shoot and the sad married couple. 

With out Permission has pressure as a polemical intervention by Nazer, explicitly addressing the need and the hazard of creating movies surreptitiously in Iran; a caption notes that crew members’ names are withheld for his or her security, given their participation in a manufacturing not authorised by Iran’s Ministry of Tradition. The movie could also be inconsistent in its texture, and irritating within the insights it yields as a generational portrait – however its urgency and its risk-taking can’t be faulted.