Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi (‘Holy Spider’) and filmmaker Guy Nattiv (‘Golda’) co-directed this story of a female judoka fighting her country’s authoritarian government.

At a moment of war and deep division in the Middle East, a film co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian is already a victory in and of itself. But the gripping sports drama Tatami, which follows a female judo champ whose career is severely jeopardized by Iran’s government during an international tournament, is more than just a promising collaboration between two filmmakers hailing from opposing sides of a major conflict.

Shot in stark black-and-white by DP Todd Martin (The Novice), who uses the Academy ratio to lend the drama a claustrophobic feel, Tatami bears some of the marks of classic boxing flicks like Body and Soul or The Set-Up, where a talented fighter is attacked by sinister forces outside the ring while taking a pummeling inside it. Here, those forces are the political operatives sent to Tbilisi to prevent national champion Leila Hosseini (the impressive Arienne Mandi, an American actress of Chilean and Iranian descent) from advancing too far in a tournament that could end with her fighting — and possibly losing to — the reigning Israeli champ, Shani Lavi (Lir Katz).

It’s also an engrossing sports flick in its own right, and one with a convincingly femme-centric point of view. Leila is a bull in the ring, taking out opponents with spectacular body slams (or whatever they’re called in judo) that she seems to pull out of her hat. She’s also a loving mother and wife — a fact that’s put to the test when the authorities start harassing her family, pressuring her to give up before she reaches the last round.

Maryam is under the gun as well, both as Leila’s longtime coach and as a daughter whose father is quickly taken into custody, and possibly beaten, so that she’ll act on the regime’s behalf. The well-structured script (by co-director Guy Nattiv and Elham Erfani) reveals that Maryam may herself have forfeited a tournament when she was at the prime of her career, making her inner conflict all the more nerve-wracking.

The film’s pressure-cooker atmosphere builds to a crescendo as Leila gets closer to the final, surviving several beatings on the mat while government thugs, as well as the rest of her team, tighten their grip around her. Dynamic editing by Yuval Orr keeps the action on the move, cutting between multiple viewpoints — including that of a concerned tournament official, played by Jaime Ray Newman — as Martin’s roving camera takes us in and out of the ring, with the bulk of the movie set in one location.