Director: Michael Winterbottom
Set against the final years of the British Mandate in Palestine, "Shoshana" (2024) traces the collision of law enforcement, ideology, and romance in 1930s Tel Aviv.
What is Shoshana about?
Michael Winterbottom's period drama follows Thomas Wilkin and Geoffrey Morton, two British police officers stationed in Mandatory Palestine, as their professional lives become entangled with the search for Avraham Stern, a poet-turned-militant organizing armed resistance to British rule. At the center is Shoshana Borochov, a young journalist whose relationship with Wilkin places her uneasily between competing loyalties. Rather than staging its politics as spectacle, the film moves through cafes, newsrooms, and administrative offices, letting the historical pressure build through conversation and surveillance rather than action set pieces. The 121-minute runtime allows the triangle of Wilkin, Morton, and Stern's movement room to develop before the mandate's final unraveling closes in on all three storylines.
Cast & crew
Douglas Booth plays Wilkin with a quiet, procedural restraint, while Harry Melling brings a colder edge to Morton. Irina Starshenbaum anchors the title role, and Aliosha Massine appears as Stern, the figure whose ideas ripple through nearly every scene even when he is offscreen.
Context & significance
Director Michael Winterbottom, known for restless genre-hopping across decades of work, approaches this chapter of pre-1948 Palestinian history with a journalist's eye for procedural detail rather than melodrama. The film draws on real historical figures and events from the late Mandate period, using their documented actions as the narrative spine.
Where & how to watch
"Shoshana" streams on K-Time with Persian subtitles, and the film's page is free to read without an account. Watching the full feature requires logging into a K-Time account, and the interface itself is built around a Farsi-first experience for viewers across the diaspora.