Women Without Men
With this debut feature, the photographer-turned-director Shirin Neshat has made a picture with vision, poetry, sexual frankness and historical sinew. It brings together, on screen, the personal and the political in the story of four women and the way their lives are affected by the turbulence of the anti-Mossadeq coup, and revives the memory of a lost generation of Iranian politics and culture: the westernised liberal intelligentsia, a white-collar class exiled and effaced by the Shah's regime, but also fiercely repudiated by the theocracy installed by the Islamic revolution of 1979. In some ways, Neshat's film addresses the same issues as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and further underlines the fact that it is Iran which, in the 21st century, has repeatedly offered the world a vivid, unapologetically feminist cinema.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Original name: Zanan-e Bedun-e Mardan
Duration: 95 min
Subtitles: English
Age limit: K15
