“Gholam” is a thriller drama film written and directed by British-Iranian photographer and filmmaker Mitra Tabrizian, serving as her debut feature. With Shahab Hosseini as the lead actor, it tells the story of an Iranian expat in London who works as a cab driver at night and has no interest in talking about his past. But things make a turn when he runs into one of his former colleagues from his army days many years back in Iran, who tries to entice him into some shady business.

“There’s a distant echo of Robert De Niro in Hosseini’s “Gholam”, a nocturnal minicab driver whose variously testing passengers fail to crack his taciturn shell.”

– Mark Kermode, film critic on The Guardian