I may say unexpectedly, but people who follow Seyyedi's works may have expected it to be brilliant.
The film displays the daily lives and social dynamics of a class of society which our cinema rarely looks at. Even when it does, it's usually made up of untasteful and threadbare cliches, pasted together in cheap films targeting audience from lower classes with old-school ideas of family honor, brotherhood, loyalty and zeal; or at best films made to show apparent social concern mostly targeting audience outside this country.
Sheeple (or as its Persian title goes, Little Rusted Brains) is not one of those films. It gets deep in the heart of Tehran's slums, showing us people that are neither dark nor clean, but as grey as it gets. People bound by poverty, caged in a community that abides by its own rules. They may be the lowest of the lowest or the kings of the neighborhood, but they are all bound by the same rules nonetheless. Even the shepherd and his dogs are just part of the herd, moving as it moves. All they can do is try to survive, and change little things when they can, showing sympathy that is in their hearts from time to time, but the herd goes where it goes.
Outstanding performances are a big part of what makes this film brilliant, Navid Mohammadzadeh and Farhad Aslani are particularly extraordinary. The characters in the film are hard to love, harder to hate, and all actors did their best to make them believable and real.
Iran's cinema normally produces one or two outstanding films every year, usually bearing the name of Asghar Farhadi as the director. But it seems this year, Seyyedi has taken on the part.
