Tales is a series of seven loosely-connected vignettes about different people dealing with their everyday problems in modern day Iran. Directed and co-written by Iran’s best-known female director, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad has spent her career moving between documentary and fiction, highlighting the way to two inform one another and in Tales she revisits the themes of her earlier works. These are stories of love, crushed hopes, addition and abuse – and as told by a woman filmmaker with real life experiences of the country, they have a strong and realistic sense of the female perspective. The protagonist and ties them together is a documentary filmmaker – no doubt based on Bani-Etemed herself – and is an incisive, luminous portrait of human fallibility and virtue in the face of everyday challenges.