Tatami poster

Tatami

2024 · Guy Nattiv

When you're craving something tense and urgent that also means something — a white-knuckle watch that doubles as a portrait of real courage. Gripping rather than grim, but it's a pressure cooker, not a comfort watch.

What it's about

An Iranian judoka and her coach arrive at the Judo World Championships chasing the country's first gold — until, mid-tournament, the regime orders her to fake an injury and lose rather than risk facing an Israeli opponent. With her family's safety hanging on her next match, every bout becomes a test of how much she'll risk for the right to simply compete.

The experience

A sports movie welded to a paranoid thriller: bruising, near-real-time, with corridors and locker rooms turning into interrogation chambers between fights. Your shoulders will be up around your ears for most of it.

Performances

Zar Amir Ebrahimi, co-directing while playing the coach caught between loyalty and survival, gives the film its wounded conscience; her scenes carry the weight of her own exile from Iran.

The craft

Shot in stark black and white in a suffocating near-square frame that turns every hallway into a trap, with judo bouts staged for genuine physical impact. The near-real-time structure keeps the clock ticking through the whole film.

Why it matters

The first feature ever co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker — a collaboration that is itself a political act — and it shadows documented cases of Iranian athletes forced to choose between the podium and defection.

The first feature ever co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker — Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the latter a Cannes-winning actress living in exile since fleeing Tehran — and the collaboration is itself a political act the film never needs to announce. Shot in stark black and white and a suffocating near-square frame, it unfolds almost in real time at the Judo World Championships, where an Iranian fighter is ordered mid-tournament to fake an injury rather than risk being paired against an Israeli opponent. What follows is a sports movie welded to a paranoid thriller: bouts staged with bruising physicality, corridors and locker rooms turning into interrogation chambers, Amir Ebrahimi herself playing the coach caught between loyalty and survival. The scenario shadows documented cases — Iranian athletes have defected over exactly such orders. Premiered at Venice in 2023, it makes the mat of its title the tightest arena in recent cinema: two women, one regime, nowhere safe to fall.

Reception

Premiered at Venice 2023 to strong festival buzz, then took nearly two years to reach US screens — landing in June 2025 just as real Israel–Iran hostilities erupted, which made an already tense film feel eerily timely.

How Tatami was received, from release to now →

Influences: the films it descends from and the films it influenced

  • The Set-Up (1949) — Confines its entire fight to a single arena told in near real-time, the running screen-clock synced to the bout — the exact real-time-single-location scaffold Tatami rebuilds around a championship mat.
  • Body and Soul (1947) — James Wong Howe's on-skates handheld camera shooting inside the ropes in high-contrast B&W established the intimate, sweat-lit combat photography Tatami echoes on the tatami surface.
  • Raging Bull (1980) — Michael Chapman's expressionist high-contrast black-and-white turns the sporting body into a punished canvas — the same monochrome grammar of muscle, effort and pain Tatami adopts for judo.
  • Ida (2013) — Revived the boxy Academy 1.37:1 frame with rigorous static B&W compositions, the near-square format Tatami borrows to box its athlete inside mounting pressure.
  • Son of Saul (2015) — Locks a near-square Academy frame in a tight, unrelenting follow on one protagonist's face and body amid off-screen menace — the claustrophobic single-subject staging Tatami applies to a wrestler under regime threat.
  • High Noon (1952) — Pioneered synchronizing screen time to story time as a ticking-clock structure where political cowardice closes in — the real-time moral-siege architecture Tatami stages across successive matches.
  • Rope (1948) — Compresses an entire drama into one continuous location in near real-time, generating suspense purely from confinement — the single-location pressure chamber Tatami inherits.
  • Offside (2006) — Builds near-real-time tension at a single sports venue from Iranian women defying a state ban on their athletic participation, drawn from real defiance — Tatami's exact fusion of women's agency, sport and political disobedience.
  • The Wrestler (2008) — Its handheld camera trailing the athlete from backstage tunnels into the arena maps the geography of combat sport as bodily labor — the behind-the-competitor follow Tatami uses to bind coach and fighter.
  • Whiplash (2014) — Editing rhythm and escalating close-ups convert a skill contest into a psychological thriller of authority and endurance — the tension-engineering Tatami transplants to bout-by-bout stakes.
  • Victoria (2015) — Sustains a single real-time throughline whose unbroken temporal propulsion never lets characters (or viewers) off the hook — the momentum logic Tatami reproduces across a tournament day.
  • Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) — Traces a woman's existential crisis in near-real-time over a compressed span in the city — the female-centered real-time structure Tatami reframes as a fighter's single decisive day.

Similar films

All the films related to Tatami →

Watch it with: curated runs of related films

  • No Way to Say No — Watch these when you want to see individuals forced to perform for a state, an army, or a corporation — they rhyme on the impossible arithmetic of complicity and defiance.