I’m alive,” mutters 70-year-old Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) through the blanketing layers of sleep. It’s a daily ritual. She finally dozes off after a restless night, only to be woken by one of her friends phoning to check up on her. Mahin barely sees them now. The once weekly get-togethers have become yearly; the gossipy conversation is, of late, dominated by discussions of bowel polyps and kidney failure. Widowed for 30 years and alone since her daughter and grandchildren emigrated, in her quiet home on the outskirts of Tehran, Mahin feels the ache of isolation on a daily basis. She’s alive. But is she living?
Mahin decides to take control of her fate and sets out to revamp her love life. Before long, her eye is caught by taxi driver Faramaz (Esmaeel Mehrabi). Throwing caution to the winds, she engineers a night to remember, filled with music, dance and brain-bruising quantities of wine. But plans have a way of going awry in this lovely, intimate, tragicomic tale of late-blooming love in the shadow of Iran’s repressive regime.
