Shayda: An Homage to The Resilience of Women
By Liz Braun
Rating: A
Shayda begins with a particularly unsettling scene: a six-year-old child is walked through a busy airport by her mother and a social worker and told to look around and remember what she sees.
It’s so she’ll know what to do in case her father — who may abduct her — ever brings her there.
Both a horror story about domestic abuse and a love-letter to the mother-daughter relationship, Shayda is an award-winning first feature about female agency from writer-director Noora Niasari. It’s partly based on Niasari’s own childhood experience living with her mother in a women’s shelter.
The film is set in 1995. Shayda (the luminous Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and her little girl Mona (Selina Zahednia) are living in a safe house for women in Australia.
Shayda is Iranian, having come to Australia with her husband a few years prior; now she has left that abusive relationship and must protect herself and her daughter, even as she deals with censure from the Iranian community and racism from some of the locals. It’s a lot to handle. Nonetheless, Shayda remains focused on her daughter’s wellbeing.
The story unfolds around Nowruz — Persian New Year — and the spring equinox, a time of rebirth and renewal. Ironically, that’s the start of fall in Shayda’s new home in Australia.
To mark the festival, Shayda patiently shows Mona the rituals and ceremonies involved in celebrating the new year, and teaches her daughter traditional dance. Dancing marks moments of happiness throughout the movie; there is joy in tradition and joy in the physical and psychological relief to be found in getting up and dancing amid fear and oppression.
That fear is illustrated in a scene that has Shayda describing an incident in the past when she was assaulted by her husband. At the time, she called the police; they informed her they could lock her husband up, but it might take six months until the case comes to court, and she'd have no way to support herself or Mona during that time.
That's the exact Hobson’s Choice available to so many women in this situation.
Not long afterward, Shayda’s husband (Osamah Sami) is allowed unsupervised visits with their daughter, and the film shifts into high gear —high anxiety gear, to be specific. Shayda’s husband has no interest in a divorce, and as soon as he’s finished medical school, he intends to return to Iran and take Mona with him, regardless of what the child or her mother want. That conflict simmers along, quietly escalating until the tension is unbearable.
In the third act of Shayda, a slight shift in perspective emphasizes Mona’s point of view, making it clear the child’s happiness is aligned with her mother’s.
Filmmaker Niasari indicates hope for the future in a quiet moment near the end of the film — after a day from a hell and a near-death experience, Shayda calmly reminds Mona to brush her teeth, and to motivate her, suggests the two can brush their teeth together.
It’s all of motherhood in 15 seconds.
Shayda won the Audience Award (World Cinema - Dramatic) at Sundance in 2023. The film first played in Canada at TIFF 2023.
Shayda. Written and directed by Noora Niasari. Starring Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Selina Zahednia, Leah Purcell, Osamah Sami. In theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal March 22 and opening throughout the spring in other cities.