It’s back-to-back Fantasia episodes on Someone Else’s Movie, as this week I welcome Ava Maria Safai, who’s bringing her first feature Foreigner to Montreal for its world premiere this Thursday night. It’s good!

And Ava picked a great movie to talk about: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes-honored, Oscar-nominated drama about an Iranian family cracking under a mixture of political and personal oppression. If you haven’t seen the film, by all means seek it out before you listen to the episode … or just seek it out anyway, because it’s outstanding. And you know what, do listen to the episode, because Ava has a great perspective on both Rasoulof’s story and its larger allegorical power. So there.

How to find it? Surely you already know. Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re trapped with your family in the basement dungeon of your father’s childhood home. Or save it for your next jog, I don’t know your life.

After that, you can catch up on your Shiny Things, because I”ve been on a roll: Last week I covered the new releases of Final Destination: Bloodline, Friendship and All We Imagine As Light, and the very satisfying 4K catalogue titles High Society, To Catch a Thief and Clueless. There’s a lot more coming this week, so upgrade that subscription! The last thing you want to do is miss out.