News Center – The film "The Son – Mother," which premiered in 2017, boldly reveals the intersection of economic and social oppression, and how customs turn into a force that controls women's destinies and reproduces injustice within the working class.

Leyla is a young woman who, after her husband's death, finds herself facing a harsh, merciless life. She alone bears the burden of raising her two children: Amir-Ali, a 12‑year‑old boy, and her young daughter. She works in a factory for a meager wage that barely keeps them alive, and amid a near‑total lack of job security, her survival and that of her children becomes a daily miracle.

In this same place, Kazem, the factory bus driver who has also lost his wife, proposes marriage to her. But his offer is not without a price: he imposes a harsh condition – that her son Amir-Ali not live with them. He justifies this by "what people will say" and because he has a daughter at home, as if society has the right to invade homes and impose its conditions on others' lives.

Leyla, threatened with dismissal from her job, finds herself at a mercyless crossroads: accepting the marriage means securing a minimum of stability for herself and her daughter, but it also means sacrificing her son. Rejection means falling into extreme poverty that will swallow her and both her children. In the end, she chooses marriage – a decision that shakes Amir‑Ali's world and turns it upside down.

The film "Pesar‑Madar" ("The Son – Mother"), the first feature film by director Mahnaz Mohammadi, does not present just a family story; it sharply reveals the reality of the working class and widowed women in a society where work becomes a means of survival, not liberation. Leyla is not only a struggling woman but a worker trapped by poverty that presses on every decision she makes.

The dilemma she faces is not an individual choice, but the result of a social and economic structure that tightens its grip on people's destinies. Leyla is caught between economic collapse threatening her existence and emotional collapse threatening her relationship with her son. This experience is not an exception, but a reality lived by many working‑class women who daily stand under the weight of livelihood and social judgments.

The film exposes how traditions and customs can turn into tools of oppression no less cruel than the law. "What people say" becomes an authority that controls women's bodies, choices, and futures.

At the same time, the film paints an accurate picture of the intertwining of forms of injustice. Leyla is oppressed both as a woman and as a worker. Workers who themselves suffer from exploitation turn, under pressure, into part of the same system of oppression. Thus, the film reveals that injustice is not linear, but a complex network reproduced within classes, relationships, and cultural structures.

In the end, the film "The Son – Mother" raises a fundamental question: when a person is stripped of the ability to truly choose, can they be held responsible for the tragic decisions they are forced to make? Or does responsibility lie with the system that creates these choices and narrows them until they disappear?

On Workers' Week, the film gains additional meaning: it reminds us that when work is practiced within unfair structures, it can turn from a source of security into a source of fragility, pushing people into an inevitable series of forced choices.