Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s Rehana Maryam Noor (RMN) that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard, is one of the most stunning films in recent memory. It has made history as Bangladesh’s first feature film to make it to Cannes’ official selection—19 years after Tareque Masud’s Matir Moina (The Clay Bird) was in Directors’ Fortnight, a parallel section, in 2002. India has no fiction feature at Cannes this year, but we do have Payal Kapadia’s The Night of Knowing Nothing (Directors’ Fortnight, experimental docu-fiction) and Rahul Jain’s Invisible Demons (Cinema for the Climate, documentary).

Azmeri Haque Badhan plays RMN’s titular protagonist, Rehana Maryam Noor, a doctor and assistant professor in a medical school. She summarily expels a student for apparently cheating in an exam. Later, she witnesses another student, Annie, emerging distressed from Prof Arefin’s (Kazi Sami Hassan) room, following sexual assault. Furious when Annie refuses to pursue the case, Noor decides to claim it was she who got raped, in order to get justice: she wants the rapist to resign, to prevent him assaulting other students. Not only does Noor pay a very high personal price in her obsessive quest for justice, but her stubborn ethics disturbingly impacts her little daughter Emu (Afia Jahin Jaima). We see the cyclical nature of violence across generations in a patriarchal society that, by almost always quickly dismissing women’s experiences of the truth, actively enable rapists and bullies to get away and thrive.