This year's Ajyal Film Festival in Doha, from Nov. 11-23, was held in a hybrid format with some viewers watching "the drama" at the theater and some, like me, attending online. One of the films that really spoke to this hybrid format was Massoud Bakhshi's "Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness." The film is about a reality TV program that has an in-studio audience and people watching at home who participate by "voting."

The Iranian TV show that inspired the film invites the relatives of a murdered person to forgive the assailant. This is an instance when the premise of a reality show is taken to its limit as everything is at stake because Iran applies Quranic verses to the letter. The program lets the relatives of the victim decide the outcome rather than relegate the decision to a court or a judge. Because it is a show, however, a relative becomes the judge as per the law, but there is also a jury of sorts that is not made up of selected members of the public. Instead, it is the whole of Iran getting on their phones and texting their decision to the program so that the relative can go to that "call a member of the public" option when they have a hard time deciding.

"Yalda" is, in certain ways, reminiscent of films about courtrooms and quiz shows, where the person is exposed uneasily to the public. As is the usual case with these films, much depends on the actors to carry the story forward as the setting is quite limited and everything happens in the same building. Bakhshi does not resort to flashbacks to give us several versions of how the crime might have happened but instead provides us photographs of the murderer and the victim in their happier days and a short video of the killer showing the police what happened.

The crime here, just like the TV program, is very Iranian. The killer – though the circumstances never fully become clear and her main crime seems to be not calling an ambulance after her partner falls – is a young woman, Maryam, who has been living with an older man in "a temporary marriage." This is a curious Iranian social institution that other Muslim countries like to exoticize without quite knowing much about it. Through young Maryam's interrogation, the audience gets a better sense of what it might mean. It seems these temporary marriages are dissolved very easily and the man can impose very strict rules on the woman. In this case, the husband stipulates that Maryam does not get pregnant and a row that ends in his death is triggered when he learns that his temporary wife has not aborted the baby they have conceived. Bakhshi does not shy away from piling on the haram (forbidden) or halal (allowed) tensions throughout the conversations had in the program. How socially accepted is "temporary marriage"? Why are such strict stipulations allowed? How haram is it to abort a pregnancy if your marriage contract doesn't allow you to have children? These are very Islamic questions, but also plain moral ones discussed elsewhere in the world.

Maryam is played by Sadaf Asgari in all her nervous excitement. Iranian cinema fans will remember her from "Disappearance" in which she played yet another unfortunate girl in her quest to get an abortion. It is no secret that Iranian cinema likes to tackle complex issues. Here, Maryam's character is unsuccessfully steered by her mother, from the beginning of the film, who tries to keep things in control and to calibrate her daughter's comportment, particularly when she is asking for forgiveness from Mona, the murdered man's daughter. Maryam and Mona's conversation about the latter's father's death paints a picture of a society, recognizable from many other places in the world, where the economic class you belong to determines your life and marriage choices.

The director takes great care with each character and through the few scenes we spend alone with Mona, with her on the phone, we see that she may have to forgive Maryam due to certain other problems she is facing. The stories of the characters converge in a way that suggests forgiveness is never a straightforward matter and often not the high-minded virtue we want it to be. It is a state of affairs people arrive at after weighing the pros and cons of the situation.

This constant calculation is embodied throughout the film by Maryam's mother. Little details of movement and gesture painting her as a schemer pay off towards the end of the film when we learn she has been hiding something from her daughter, of Greek tragedy proportions. The clue to this big reveal is given in an elliptical scene that we come to expect from Iranian cinema. We see a couple waiting to speak to the producers of the program but they are not accepted into the studio, and at one moment, at last, they convince one of the team to listen to what they have to say. By that time, however, the camera has moved behind several glass doors and we see them speak from afar inside the building while they are at the entrance, and we know some very important information has been imparted.

The use of space, of closing in and opening out, is used masterfully by Bakhshi. When Maryam's show is finished and the verdict is spoken, we see Maryam, her mother, Mona and the show host start to leave but before we can work out who is trying to get a private word with whom, the fourth wall, as it were, disappears. A curtain on one wall is lifted to reveal an auditorium with red chairs and an audience moving in, reminiscent of that meta moment when a director yells "Cut!" from the seats below. This, however, is not that kind of a scene. This is a TV station and the studio is now being converted to another sort of program with a hall audience. The show must go on indeed!

At the end of the film after the rather hot debate between Mona and Maryam, we are then taken out of the building to see the various characters, from what one may call a "god's eye" perspective, with Tehran's lights beyond the TV building, take various taxis and cars to their homes. Bakhshi takes his time with the camera as we watch them, not through glass doors, but the silently falling snow. After all the tension he's subjected us to, this attempt to calm us down is very welcome, seeing all human folly as if in a snow globe, contained and always ready to repeat those fatal movements.