In 17-year-old director Samira Makhmalbaf's remarkably assured directorial debut, two girls who have been locked in their house by their father for the first 12 years of their lives explore the outside world for the first time. Some of the film's most moving scenes depict the girls' first adventures around their neighborhood. Physically awkward, developmentally disabled, and barely able to speak, they nonetheless display a very real charm and take great pleasure in eating ice cream for the first time (unfamiliar with the concept of money, they steal it from the boy who is selling it, then feed some to a nearby goat). Having people play themselves in dramatized versions of actual events is a strategy common to many Iranian films, notably Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and Samira's father Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence. In The Apple it allows Samira Makhmalbaf to explore the film's events from several points of view and with an amazing generosity of spirit. The girls' father, who could easily have been portrayed as a monster, instead comes across as a poor, uneducated man caring for a blind wife who can't think of any other way to protect his daughters. The first film by an Iranian woman to receive international attention, The Apple is, among other things, a covert feminist fable that alludes to the condition of women in Iran, which the final shot (featuring the blind mother) makes clear.