‘I wish someone would make a film about me, a filmmaker forced to make films in his cellar,’ runs a line in Without Permission, an Iranian-Scottish drama film directed, written and produced by Hassan Nazer. This hybrid movie looks and feels like a documentary but cleverly blurs lines between fact and fiction. Behrouz Sebt Rasoul plays an unnamed director who returns to Iran from exile and hopes to make a scripted film in his homeland. The director’s film features a group of Iranian children who are gathered, with parental permission, in a remote site to answer questions on camera about their upbringing: ‘If people knew everything that happened in our childhood, how would they treat their children?’ is one such poser. They are asked to imagine a hypothetical meeting on an idyllic ‘buttercup plain’, but does their upbringing, some hailing from single sex schools, stifle their natural reactions?

Headscarves and top buttons are considered here; scrutiny over the Iranian government’s cultural strategies hang heavily over the children’s innocent words. At one point, the father of an Afghan girl angrily storms the set, claiming that her mother didn’t have authority to let the girl be filmed; the authorities seize the filmmaker’s hard drives and question his motives, adding more power to this plea for the security of future generations. Iran has no lack of problems in 2026, but Without Permission wisely zeroes in on questions of personal freedom, issues likely to be understood by sympathetic audiences worldwide.

Without Permission reviewed as part of Glasgow Film Festival.

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