A Separation (2011)

A husband and wife make plans to move to America to give their daughter a better life, but his reluctance to leave his going-senile father results in his refusal to go forward with leaving the country.  The wife is on a time limit due to the papers they procured and is trapped unless they divorce...which neither of them wants.  To force the situation, she moves out...he hires help...the help has problems of her own...and things go from bad to worse, but always completely believably.

Because my Iranian father grew up in Tehran before coming to the US for college, I'm always interested in movies that give me a peek to the normal lives of its citizens -- I'm talking The White Balloon and Children of Heaven rather than Not Without My Daughter.  This was different than any Iranian film I'd seen in that it was neither heartwarming nor horrific.  I recognized the people and the desperation even though the situations wouldn't occur here.  The empathy I felt for most of the characters was real and the situation impossible.

The movie certainly earned its best foreign language film Oscar.

B+