Dir: Babak Payami. Italy-Iran-Canada-Switzerland. 2001. 105mins.

If it weren't for the fact that another Iranian film (Jafar Panahi's The Circle) had scooped the Golden Lion last year, Secret Ballot would have been in with more than a shout for the top prize at this year's Venice shindig. As it was, Babak Payami had to make do with the best director award. Former Locarno festival boss Marco Muller - now a producer with Benetton creative arm Fabrica - specialises in uncovering small but exportable films from countries with little production infrastructure (previous projects include Zhang Yuan's Seventeen Years and Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land). Although it is in no way a crossover movie, the charming Secret Ballot should do at least as well as previous Iranian arthouse favourites in selected cine-literate territories.

On one level, this film about a young electoral officer who is sent to collect votes from the inhabitants of a remote island in the Persian Gulf is a parable about democracy. But it is also an occasionally hilarious comedy, with moments that border on the surreal. And it is also - and most winningly - a delicate, understated love story. Secret Ballot opens at a desolate military guardpost on a scrubby beach, where two soldiers take it in turn to sleep and watch. Most days nothing happens, which suits the guards perfectly. On this particular day, though, one of the soldiers is ordered to accompany an electoral officer and her mobile ballot box in her stubborn search for every last voter on the island. One problem follows another: voters who speak only dialect, voters who are all at a funeral and others who can be reached only by boat, a voter who refuses to vote for anyone but Allah. Gradually, the electoral officer's dogmatic idealism and the soldier's grumpy suspicion of female bureaucrats are eroded away.

The film has a pared-back grandeur, a sort of mythical, non-realist. At the beginning, the line between the desert and the blue sea makes a Rothko-like frame for the futility of the soldiers' lives, which revolve around a single bunk bed, stranded on the sand. In another scene a traffic light stands in the middle of the desert; it is stuck on red. At times the insistent long-shots become wearing, especially when we are forced to watch, for example, a boat cross from one side of the screen to the other. But despite the occasional longueur, Secret Ballot emerges as a resonant and often very funny reflection on the electoral process. The soundtrack - a sort of austere Persian tango by In The Mood For Love composer Michael Galasso - suits the mood perfectly.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film, from a production point of view, is the way that it demonstrates once again how relative terms like 'Iranian cinema' have become. Secret Ballot was made with mostly Italian money and partly Italian crew by a director who has spent most of his adult life in Canada; and its commercial potential at home must be remote (see, for example, Marzieh Meshkini's festival favourite The Day I Became a Woman - also shot on Kish Island - which opened in a single cinema in Tehran). Fabrica now has a whole stable of non-Western filmmakers who are making films for export. Nothing wrong with that, of course - especially if the films are as good as this.

Prod cos: Fabrica Cinema, Payam Films, Sharmshir.
Co prod: Rai Cinema, RTSI - Televisione Svizzera.
Int'l sales: Celluloid Dreams.
Prod: Marco Muller, Babak Payami.
Scr: Babak Payami.
Cinematography: Farzad Jodat.
Prod des: Mandana Masoudi.
Ed: Babak Karimi.
Music: Michael Galasso.
Main cast: Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Yossef Habashi.