Can an Iranian fight an Israeli?

The film “Tatami” is co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian. This is the first time that’s ever happened. Its dialogue is almost entirely in Farsi. And it is about an international championship competition in the comparatively obscure sport of judo.

Yet the mix of these disparate elements implausibly has resulted in the most exciting and suspenseful of political thrillers, a film that has the potential and quite frankly deserves to be the breakout hit of the year.

It’s centered on an Iranian wrestler, Leila Housseni (Arienne Mandi of “The L Word”), participating in a world championship event she is expected to win. But on the road to the title, she will have to meet an Israeli competitor. So the Iranian authorities tell her coach, Maryam Ghanbari (played by co-director Zar Amir), to order Leila to fake an injury and drop out of the competition.

Leila refuses, and as the competition continues, the threats to both wrestler and coach escalate and are extended to members of their families back home. If all this sounds far-fetched, it is something that happens on a regular basis. Iran’s Islamic government prohibits its athletes from competing against Israeli athletes anywhere, including the Olympics.

Speaking on Zoom from Los Angeles, co-director and co-screenwriter Guy Nattiv (“Golda”) said the genesis of his film “was during the pandemic. I watched a video of this Iranian judo fighter in Tokyo.”

That was Saeid Mollaei, then the reigning world champion, who was instructed to withdraw or lose intentionally to avoid a possible matchup against an Israeli. Mollaei refused and then sought asylum in Germany at the conclusion of the event.

“I thought this would make a great feature,” Nattiv told me. “It would require just one location, and I could actually write it pretty fast. But then I thought I should do something like I did with ‘Skin.’ That was a short before it became a full-length feature.”

Nattiv has a history of making short versions of films he later expands. “Skin,” in fact, won an Academy Award for Live Action Short. On a trip to Israel, he proposed the idea to Adi Ezroni, then a vice president at Keshet Studios. “She loved it,” he recalls. “But she told me this wasn’t a short. It’s a feature. ‘I’ll give you the budget to write it, and we’re going to shoot it as a feature now.’”

Guy Nattiv

However, political events made him change his focus: the death of Masha Amini while in custody of Tehran’s religious police for not wearing a hijab set off the Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

“More Iranian sports women were defecting and fighting the good fight,” Nattiv said. So he reversed course and decided, “Let’s make the protagonist a woman.”

He also realized he needed help. Fortunately, he was able to hook up Zar Amir, a French-based Iranian expat who had just won a Best Actress award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for her role in “Holy Spider.”

“One of the things that Zar did was take the script and she said, ‘No, no, no. It’s not authentic enough.’ She did her brush over the script, making Leila and Maryam deeper characters. She also helped cast the movie, bringing in Iranian actors [and athletes] who lived in France and Germany.”

She was so involved in every aspect of the film that Nattiv asked her to co-direct with him.

“Tatami” — those are the straw mats used in traditional Japanese homes and more recently in martial-arts competitions — was shot in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2022, well before October 7. Still, even then, security was tight. While they were filming, “the Georgian Secret Service arrested members of an Iranian hit squad sent there to assassinate an Israeli businessman.

“We didn’t announce that we were there filming. We never used the real name of the film. We called it the judo project, and we were scattered in different hotels. We never spoke our native languages. We only spoke English, and our set was closed.”

“Tatami” debuted at the Venice Film Festival in late summer 2023, still before October 7, and the Iranian women’s movement was the major topic of conversation. “So we didn’t have any difficulty. We sold the movie to many countries.”

Nattiv is a sabra, and like many others, he is largely secular. “Even my grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor, he cut off his payes. He said, ‘I lost my faith in God after what happened to me and my family.’”

But being mainly secular apparently has limits. Asked if he had a bar mitzvah, he said, “Of course. We celebrate all the holidays, and that’s important to us.”

He says “Tatami” was inspired by “the movies I grew up on in the ’70s, films like ‘The Parallax View,’ ‘Marathon Man,’ Brian DePalma films, ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ films my father took me to see.

“You know, sometimes it takes me three years to write a script. But this just flowed and was on the page in two weeks.”

“Tatami” will be released in New York on June 13 and expand to other markets in the following weeks.