Samira Makhmalbaf 

France
 

And should you put Samira next to Jake Kasdan, the 22-year-old prodigy son of Lawrence and Meg Kasdan whose Zero Effect has also been selected for Un Certain Regard, then few will deny that filmmaking today has become increasingly the business and the passion of the young. 

Like her father, whose controversial Time of Love (1991) was eventually cleared in 1995 for a Certain Regard screening – paired there with Salaam, Cinema, his docu-drama for the centennial of cinema that mirrored the consuming desire of many Iranian women to be in films – Samira Makhmalbaf approaches filmmaking as a moral medium, one of search and reflection, in which the director's primary focus should be on human dignity and, if necessary, the dark side of human behaviour. As a seven-year-old, she had her own first experience before the camera: acting in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Cyclist (1989). At 16, she took her first courses in filmmaking, later shot two shorts, and still found time to assist her father on the set.

For Sib, the original point of departure was an ordinary street in a poor district of Tehran. Several families had written to the Social Services Office about a father who had locked up his two young daughters since birth. When a social worker called on the family, the father responded: "My daughters are like flowers – expose them to the sun, and they will wither away!" The moral quest for answers prodded Samira Makhmalbaf to go further.

"I wanted to discover who had forced the parents, despite their love, to lock up their own children. And I wanted to know why some neighbours chose to ignore the affair, and even remain indifferent, for such a long time..." Ron Holloway