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The Apple
Directed by
Samira Makhmalbaf
1998
82m
Drama
7.2
85%
83%
6.3
Add to Watchlist
After twelve years of imprisonment by their own parents, two sisters are finally released by social workers to face the outside world for the first time.
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Where to Watch The Apple
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Cast of The Apple
Massoumeh Naderi
Massoumeh
Zahra Naderi
Zahra
Ghorban Ali Naderi
Father
Azizeh Mohamadi
Azizeh
Zahra Saghrisaz
Samira Makhmalbaf
Director / Writer
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Writer / Editor
Iraj Sarbaz
Executive Producer
Marin Karmitz
Producer
Véronique Cayla
Producer
Ebrahim Ghafori
Director Of Photography
Mohamad Ahmadi
Director Of Photography
Hana Makhmalbaf
Assistant Director
Marziyeh Meshkiny
Assistant Director
Akbar Meshkini
Assistant Director
Moosa Makvandi
Negative Cutter
Jahangir Rajabi-Khah
Negative Cutter
Behrooz Shahamat
Sound
Susan Jacobs
Publicist
The Apple Ratings & Reviews
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
The feature debut of 17-year-old Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf, The Apple is one part docudrama, one part parable, and the altogether involving story of 12-year-old twin girls.
Detroit Free Press
John Monaghan
[The Apple] hits upon simple, yet all-important human emotions that movies rarely capture.
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
There is nothing more haunting than the faces of those two girls, two angels who were kept in hell for more than a decade and have emerged, blinking into the light.
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A comic, lyrical, and "politically incorrect" poetic docudrama so acutely focused in its characters and ethics that it can afford to be relaxed about them, all the more remarkable coming from a director still in her teens.
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
The Apple is a film both exquisite and trenchant, even more politically resonant than poetically resonant, as are so many Iranian films that are ostensibly about children.
Newhouse News Service
Bob Campbell
Mixing documentary observation with unforced re-enactments, The Apple offhandedly exposes the deepest rifts in [Iranian] society and, despite digressions and imperfections, marks a fine debut.
Kansas City Star
Robert W. Butler
The Apple would be a good film even without the extraordinary circumstances of its creation. And when you know the "back story," as they say in the movie biz, it becomes one of those truly amazing moments in cinema.
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
The Apple closes with a beautifully poetic freeze-frame image in which a simple piece of fruit has come to represent nothing less than life itself and all its wonderful possibilities.
Washington City Paper
Mark Jenkins
As a fledgling freethinker, Samira Makhmalbaf could hardly help but see Massoumeh and Zahra as an extreme case of the fate Iranian society has in mind for her.
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
Makhmalbaf was only 17 when she started work on this project (with the help of her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, himself a renowned filmmaker). Her understanding of all members of the family is one of the movie's most remarkable qualities.
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple is astonishing on at least three counts.
L.A. Weekly
Manohla Dargis
Rarely have the lines between documentary and fiction film been blurred with such formal audacity or righteousness.
Houston Chronicle
Jeff Millar
The film has ethnographic, curiosity and some amusement value, although you may find it a strain to bring yourself to laugh at some of its humor, which is predicated upon the girls' developmental deprivation.
San Francisco Chronicle
Peter Stack
Veracity is undermined by the very idea that the subjects somehow are actors in their own story -- and yet The Apple is still quite touching.
San Francisco Examiner
Wesley Morris
At once an effulgent exercise in life-affirmation and a bemusingly crude piece of exploitative filmmaking.
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Perplexing and provocative.
Philadelphia City Paper
Sam Adams
Makhmalbaf doesn't make it hard to figure out that she intends the film as a metaphor for the condition of all women in Iran -- any one of the dozen shots of the girls chasing after an elusive apple makes that clear enough.
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Experimental docudrama, open-ended essay, The Apple is a remarkable movie.
New York Times
Lawrence Van Gelder
Makhmalbaf elicits remarkably unaffected performances.
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