Samira Makhmalbaf

Where films like Flowers in the Attic (1987), Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Dogtooth (2009) show little sympathy for the parents who become jailers to their own children, Ghorban is never demonised in The Apple, but rather shown to be a pious man and loving father, no less (although differently) imprisoned by the poverty of his education, by the sexual attitudes that he has absorbed in his own childhood, and by the inertia of circumstance.