Leila's Brothers

Leila's Brothers (برادران لیلا, 2022) is Saeed Roustaee's Iranian family drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Leila is forty, and her whole life has been spent propping up her elderly parents and four grown brothers who never learned to stand on their own.

Debt, a collapsing currency, factories crippled by sanctions — there's no money in the house, but plenty of pride. Leila comes up with a way out: pool everything into a shop unit and finally pull the family up. Then her father, old Esmail, blows the savings on a lavish clan ceremony, desperate to be named patriarch by the neighbors. What follows runs 165 minutes in which a kitchen argument can erupt like weather. Taraneh Alidoosti plays Leila as a coiled spring, while Navid Mohammadzadeh and Peyman Maadi push her brothers from pity to fury and back.

Roustaee takes apart how pride and patriarchy strangle the one clear-headed person in the room — a woman nobody will listen to. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won the FIPRESCI Prize. It's for anyone who loves dense family dramas where the fighting feels uncomfortably like your own relatives. Stream Leila's Brothers (2022) online on iFILM.