Holy Spider

Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider (Tarikkâhi) won Zar Amir Ebrahimi the Best Actress prize at Cannes 2022, Ebrahimi was a noted Iranian actress who had been forced into exile after a private-video harassment campaign in 2008 and had built a continuing French-cinema career since. The film consolidated Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish director after his earlier Border (2018) and his subsequent The Apprentice (2024), as one of the most internationally significant directors of Iranian-diaspora origin.

The film is based on the actual case of Saeed Hanaei, a construction worker in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad who murdered sixteen sex workers between 2000 and 2001 in what he later described as a religious cleansing of the streets. Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays a fictional female journalist who travels to Mashhad to investigate the killings; Mehdi Bajestani plays the killer. The film follows the journalist's procedural work and the broader social-political environment around the case, particularly the popular sympathy the killer received from segments of the Mashhad religious-conservative community after his arrest.

The film was shot in Jordan rather than Iran, with substantial Iranian-diaspora cast and crew working under the assumption that they would not be able to safely return. The production became politically consequential within Iranian-domestic cultural discourse; the Iranian government formally objected to the Cannes recognition. Abbasi's procedural commitment, the film's refusal to romanticise its subject, and Ebrahimi's central performance combined into one of the most-discussed recent works of Iranian-language cinema.