Heda is a prosperous farmer in rural Iran. He has many sheep, four wives, and 20 children. This isn’t exactly a recipe for concord. Each wife thinks things were fine till the next one came along—leaving Ziba, Wife No. 4, to shoulder both catty remarks and Heda’s physical and mental abuse. She prays to become pregnant “so that my husband won’t take a new wife” and mentions that she’s tried to kill herself several times. Life isn’t just toil and uncertainty, though. Via Fiat bus, Heda takes the fam to a nice day at a lake (“Small pieces, so we all get some,” says Wife No. 3, Shahpar, about some melon, though it’s possible to extrapolate), and he and all the ladies joke easily in the moments they’re not boiling over. Swedish-Iranian director Nahid Persson frames her subjects in spare, wide-angle views, and not just with her camera. To Heda, polygamy is simply befitting his status and, like married men in Western society fixating on their next gadget purchase, he starts fantasizing about marrying a teenage virgin. At the end of the film, he rides up with something on the back of his motorcycle, and it’s not an iPhone. —AB