General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Leila (لیلا) (1997 film)

Leila (لیلا) is a 1997 Iranian drama film written, directed, and produced by Dariush Mehrjui, in which a young married woman who learns she cannot have children is pressed by her mother-in-law to consent to her husband taking a second wife.¹ It stars Leila Hatami in the title role, Ali Mosaffa as her husband Reza, and Jamileh Sheikhi as Reza's mother, with Mohammadreza Sharifinia as Leila's uncle.¹ The film was screened at the 15th Fajr International Film Festival in 1375 (1996–97) and received one Crystal Simorgh and one Honorary Diploma there, alongside ten nominations.²

Key fact	Detail
Director, writer, producer	Dariush Mehrjui; co-produced with Faramarz Farazmand¹^•³
Year and genre	Produced in 1375 of the Iranian calendar (1997), drama, rated 15+¹
Running time	124 minutes per Filmdata; other listings give 102 or 129 minutes¹^•⁴^•⁵
Main cast	Leila Hatami (Leila), Ali Mosaffa (Reza), Jamileh Sheikhi (Reza's mother), Mohammadreza Sharifinia (Leila's uncle), Shaghayegh Farahani¹^•⁴
Source	Adapted by Mehrjui from a story by Mahnaz Ansarian; his twelfth feature film⁶
Fajr Festival results	Crystal Simorgh for Best Supporting Actress (Jamileh Sheikhi); Honorary Diploma for Best Actress (Leila Hatami); nominated in ten categories including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay²
Key crew	Cinematography Mahmoud Kalari; editing Mostafa Kheraqepush; music Keivan Jahanshahi³

Spoilers

Plot

Leila and Reza meet at a family votive gathering (nazri), marry soon after, and begin a loving, comfortable life together.⁷^•⁸ Early in the marriage, medical tests show that Leila will never be able to have children.³ Reza himself accepts this and believes their life is beautiful without a child, but his mother, a strong-willed woman with four daughters and only this one son, insists on a grandson to continue the family line and pressures Leila to let Reza take another wife.¹^•³

Leila's capitulation. Leila gives in and tries to persuade Reza, who after repeated proposals marries a young woman named Giti.¹^•⁸ On the night of the second wedding, Leila leaves the house and goes to her mother's home, and she refuses to return until she is certain the second wife has gone.² Reza, who has had a daughter, Baran, by Giti, divorces her and comes back to Leila, but she will not resume the former life.⁸ The impasse breaks only when Reza brings Baran to the annual nazri gathering years later, and Leila's attitude changes.⁸

Production

Mehrjui wrote the screenplay from a story by Mahnaz Ansarian, and the film was the twelfth feature of his career.⁶ He produced it with Faramarz Farazmand as an Iranian production.³ Mahmoud Kalari shot the film, Mostafa Kheraqepush edited it, and Keivan Jahanshahi composed the music; Manzoom's crew listing records more than 35 people in the production.³

Casting reached deep into new talent: 22 of the film's actors made their first serious screen appearance in Leila, among them Shaghayegh Farahani, Parisa Zarei, Faraj Balafkan, Pegah Asnari, Pegah Qotbi, Vahideh Mohammadifar, and Leila Qotbi.³ One commentary on the film notes that directing and managing so large a cast made Mehrjui's job unusually demanding.³

Reception and awards

At the 15th Fajr International Film Festival in 1375, Leila was nominated for ten Crystal Simorgh awards: Best Film, Best Director (Dariush Mehrjui), Best Screenplay (Mehrjui), Best Actor (Ali Mosaffa), Best Actress (Leila Hatami), Best Supporting Actress (Jamileh Sheikhi), Best Cinematography (Mahmoud Kalari), Best Set and Costume Design (Zhila Mehrjui, Faryar Javaherian, and Bita Ghazaleh-Agh), Best Sound Recording (Asghar Shahverdi), and Best Editing (Mostafa Kheraqepush).² It won two honors: the Crystal Simorgh for Best Supporting Actress for Sheikhi and an Honorary Diploma for Best Actress for Hatami.¹^•²

The film drew both devoted admirers and harsh critics from the start.⁹ On the Manzoom rating platform it holds a user score of 5.7 out of 10 from 304 voters, which the site summarizes as a public verdict of a middling but worthwhile work.³ In the same site's attribute polling, 88 to 94 percent of respondents rated the film as well-made, well-acted, creative, and family-appropriate, while only 40 percent considered it suitable for children.³

Themes and critical reading

The film's central situation, a woman who strives to find a co-wife for herself, struck one essayist as paradoxical enough to keep some viewers out of the film's world, yet the same writer credited Mehrjui's command of every formal element with making the result compelling, comparing its psychological intensity to some of Ingmar Bergman's best work.¹⁰

Three women, one system. Critics have read the film through its three female characters. The Jinha agency's review describes all three as serving a traditional patriarchal mindset: Reza's mother, fully dissolved in that culture, insists on a grandson to continue the male line, while Leila is cast as a suffering woman who leaves her feelings behind on the wedding night of Reza's second marriage.⁸^•² A Khoobo retrospective takes the opposite view of the characterization, arguing that Mehrjui treated all three women fairly, so that viewers who recognized versions of them in their own lives could find each one's presence in the story logical and persuasive; in this reading, the mother, rooted in tradition, wants only a grandchild to carry the family's old name after her death.²

The film is also placed in its moment. A BBC Persian analysis describes Leila as a coherent and distinctive work in Mehrjui's cinema, made when Iranian society was shedding an old skin: a new generation, rising after the war years and political pressures, was distancing itself from tradition and raising new demands, and Mehrjui understood that women and their concerns were the central question of that society.¹¹ At a House of Cinema cinémathèque session held on the first anniversary of Mehrjui's death, the filmmaker Tahmoures Solhjou called Leila a film about love, a family melodrama laced with Mehrjui's particular humor, in which the telephone, an object of the modern world, becomes an instrument for imposing tradition.¹²

Legacy

Twenty years after release, a Khoobo retrospective described Leila as fully a cult film, whose fans cite its characters and scenes in daily conversation the way admirers of Mehrjui's earlier Hamoun do.² Mehrjui and his wife, the screenwriter Vahideh Mohammadifar, who appears among the film's first-time actors, were killed in their home in October 2023, and to mark the first anniversary of his death a restored print of Leila was screened at the House of Cinema in Tehran.¹²^•⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026