Iran’s most combustible cinematic export of the past few years hasn’t been a genre or a movie star — it has been defiance itself, a run of films shot against the state’s rules on how women may dress and move through the world. Ghasideh Golmakani’s debut feature sharpens that defiance into a single satirical inversion: she puts the veil on the men. The gambit is now going to market, with French sales outfit DreamLab Films boarding worldwide rights on the Iran-Germany co-production ahead of its world premiere in Toronto.

Titled Head to Head (Sar beh Sar), the film follows an acclaimed female writer-director who makes the radical choice to require her male actors to wear skirts and headscarves for her latest project. It is a film-within-a-film that flips Iran’s compulsory dress code onto the bodies it normally exempts, mining dark comedy from the sight of leading men fussing over fabric they never chose. As Deadline first reported in revealing the deal — alongside a first clip — Golmakani laces absurdist farce with the sharp social observation that has run through her internationally screened shorts on gender, power and taboo.

DreamLab’s move is a familiar bet with a sharper edge. The Paris-based company has long championed boundary-pushing Iranian cinema — it handles Pooya Badkoobeh’s Dressage — and boarding Head to Head signals confidence that a premise this legible, role-reversal as protest, can travel well past the festival circuit and into distribution. With Iranian filmmakers increasingly working outside, or in open defiance of, official approval, a satire that literalizes the argument is exactly the kind of title a buyer can position without a footnote.

The ensemble reinforces the pedigree. Alongside Mehrnoosh Satari and Saeed Naderi, the cast includes Ebrahim Azizi, seen in Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, and Lili Farhadpour, who starred in My Favorite Cake — both fixtures of the recent wave of Iranian cinema made in tension with the authorities. Golmakani wrote and produced the feature herself, with David M. Lorenz aboard as associate producer and Saba M. Rezaei as executive producer.

Head to Head plays in TIFF’s Discovery programme, the strand reserved for first and second features, when the festival unfolds in Toronto in September, and DreamLab launches its sales campaign there.

The first clip’s tell is a small one: a leading man adjusting a headscarf he never asked for, unsure where to let his eyes land. In a cinema that has spent years filming women refusing that same cloth, handing it to the men is the whole argument — folded into one uneasy gesture.

Tags: TIFF, festival-deal, DreamLab Films, Ghasideh Golmakani, Head to Head, social-commentary