One thing to try not to miss at film festivals is the rare films that don’t get any other platform for viewing. Narva Marbili’s The Sealed Soil is one of these, touted as the oldest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman.

Marbili made it in 1977 as part of her university thesis. This is three years before the Iranian revolution but even so, she filmed it in secret over seven days. It is filmed on 16mm with natural lighting and no sound, with all of the audio track and dialogue added later after she smuggled the raw footage in her suitcase back to New York.

It’s a story about a woman in a rural village in Iran. Influenced by Bresson, and reminiscent of Ozu and Ray, Marbili uses a static wide camera to show the routines and rituals of women in the village. At the centre of the story is Roo-Bekheir (Flora Shabaviz), a daughter who is of marriageable age but keeps turning down her suitors. The rest of the village, including her parents and the village chief, see this as reason to ostracise or pressure her. The other women don’t talk to her, suspecting that she is possessed by a devil because she won’t conform.

There is very little dialogue but when there is, we are suddenly given context. The village chief saying that in fact the government no longer forces women to marry against their will but in the same breath implying that Roo-Bekheir will just bring trouble on herself if she doesn’t comply. More shocking is the revelation that she is 18, because she carries herself with a world weariness that we assume comes from age and maturity. When we understand that her mother was married at seven, ran away every month at the age of 10, and by 18 had born eight children, you can see how 18 perhaps has no similarities to adolescence in our own cultures.

The quiet minutiae is occasionally soporific but there is an outstanding scene in the middle of the film where Roo-Bekheir has a rare moment of freedom. It is the legacy of all of the other films I’ve watched about women oppressed by their culture and family that I kept expecting some kind of violence to happen to her. Happily it never does but it’s quite possible that what does happen to her is equally tragic.