MORTICIAN

With Gola, Nima Sadr

The wintry landscape of Quebec provides an apt canvas against which a dark and cryptic drama of co-dependence and resistance to the far-off Iranian regime plays out as a beautifully rendered tale that has the intimate air of a diary.  Mojtaba, a humble middle-aged Iranian ex-pat who prepares bodies for burial according to Islamic tradition receives an unusual request from a reclusive woman living in the woods.  The task that Jana (played by the exiled Iranian singer known by the stage name Gola) proposes shocks him, and yet the money is good.  A strange and touching friendship takes form in the weeks to come but neither Mojtaba nor Jana anticipates how the long arm of terror will reach out to them.  In Persian and English with English subtitles.