Director Bani-E’temad is one of the outstanding women filmmakers of the Iranian cinema. This hard-hitting drama about the realities of subsistence in a lower-class family trains a keen eye on the underside of life in contemporary Iran—including such taboo topics as prostitution, drugs, and corruption—but without ever falling into pathos or polemics. Tuba, plagued by asthma from her years of work in a textile factory, must tend to her bedridden husband and four children, including a pregnant daughter who lands back on her doorstep, a teenage son in hot water for his radical political activities, and her only gainfully employed son, an assistant to a clothing manufacturer, who dreams only of getting an exit visa to Japan. Under the City’s Skin was a box-office hit in Iran.