All My Sisters focuses for the most part of on two young women who happen to be the director's nieces (Film review)

  

Advertising for the 50th Hong Kong International 

Film Festival hanging on the railings of an overhead bridge  

 

All My Sisters (Austria-France-Germany-Iran, 2025) 

- Massoud Bakshi, director and co-producer (with five others)

- Part of the HKIFF's Documentary Competition program 

 

The first film of the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival that I viewed 18 films ago was Woman and Child, an Iranian cinematic offering.  The final film of those I chose to watch was also hails from Iran.  (All My Sisters is officially listed as four country co-production but is very recognizably an Iranian work.)  

 

To some extent, this is not something that's extraordinary as the Hong Kong International Festival has long programmed from that Middle Eastern country (and, in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's been a big champion of Jafar Panahi over the years.)  At the same time though, I figure this is also a reflection of Iran having been in the news in recent months (even before the Iran-USA War commenced); and the focus on Iranian women in the films (I think also of Past Future Continuous) selected for this edition of the HKIFF reflecting this.

 

Of course this is not to say that the likes of All My Sisters got selected by the Hong Kong International Film Festival as a "pity vote".  Because it genuinely is an interesting documentary work; one that is the result of filmmaker Massoud Bakshi training his camera on his two nieces for a couple of decades or so and then putting together home videos that, individually, can seem rather ordinary but collectively make for an interesting portrait of two sisters growing up and coming of age in Tehran under the rule of the Mullahs.

 

When we first see Mahya and Zahra in All My Sisters, they are sans hijab as they are still young -- and, as Massoud Bakshi stresses, in the company of family.  Even while it's clear that they are living in Iran, they still can seem like generic carefree preteens similar to girls in their age group in various other parts of the world as they happily listen to what's emanating from cassette players, playing with Barbies at home, and swinging on equipment in public playgrounds.

 

But at the first sign of puberty, the headscarfs get put on.  Also, their religious grandmother starts trying to get them more interested in the Quran and Islam in general.  And there is a distinct and growing sense that their lives will be more restricted and less carefree.  (It would have been interesting for there to have been a parallel coverage of Mahya and Zahra's male contemporaries.  But the glimpses we see of the men as well as boys, who can go about their lives with much less covering, already says quite a bit.)

 

Something that is stressed more than once in All My Sisters is that what's shown in the film is shown with the consent of Mahya and Zahra.  Which makes it really surprising, then, that we see them being among the Iranians who take part in the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests.

 

At the same time, this helps makes the title of the film make sense.  In that, for a good part of it, I thought it would have been more appropriately entitled "My Two Nieces".  But when Mahya and Zahra are depicted and looked upon as representative Iranian women, than the chosen title of All My Sisters makes quite the political statement about Iranian women and society as a while indeed.

 

My rating for this film: 7.