Leila is a woman from an affluent background who is confronted with a painful reality: at the start of her marriage she finds out she cannot have children. Her husband Reza doesn’t mind; he believes they can be happy without children too. Reza’s mother, a dynamic woman with four daughters and a son, is not so willing to accept things as they are. She urges Leila to convince her husband that he should take another wife too. Leila is weighed down by a leaden load of guilt. She feels obliged to accept another woman in the house – a house that had previously only been filled with love.In the past, Hubert Bals used to keep an eye on Mehrjui’s cinematographic oeuvre. The very first Rotterdam festival even had two Mehrjui films in the programme: The Cow, about a man obsessed by the sorrow of his cow, and The Postman, a feature loosely based on Büchner’s Woyzeck. The films of Mehrjui, who is regarded as one of Iran’s most intelligent film-makers, are almost all about relationships between men and women. When Leila had its world première at the last Fajr Film Festival in Iran, this film about sex and class differences in and around a marriage evoked very different reactions from the audience.
