30 Years of Solitude

By Mona Zandi Haghighi

A woman long estranged from her family maintains a quiet but not-quite-respectable life with her teenage son until her sister succeeds in tracking her down after a 15-year search. A dark family secret proves difficult to bring to light, even as its legacy continues to impact both sisters and the newly rebellious boy.

Rakhshan Bani E'temad and Mohsen Abdolvahab
A film that depicts people whose love and destiny have been violated and changed by war.

It is New Year's Eve during the Iran-Iraq war, and Tehran is being repeatedly attacked with missiles. Gilaneh, a lonely middle-aged villager has to send her son to the war. She must also accompany her daughter to Tehran in search of her son-in-law, who has illegally left the service...

15 years later: again it is New Year's Eve, and Gilaneh - fatigued with life - is taking care of her chemically-wounded son, and is far away from her daughter. Incapable of looking after her son, Gilaneh is waiting for a woman from the South who has lost her husband in the war, and who made a promise to get married to Gilaneh's son.

Mitra Farahani

Just a Woman is about a transsexual called Morvarid. Following a legal sex-change operation, for the first time she dons a chador and prepares to venture outside as a woman. Challenging western assumptions about life in a Muslim society by revealing the complexities of one lived reality, the video is especially impressive in Moravid's unapologetic account of her work as a prostitute and the depiction of sex work in urban Tehran.

Mahvash Sheikholeslami

A narrative on the routines of a fisherman's life, who works with a natural pace in a rushed world.

Marzieh Meshkini

"The day I became a Woman" is a poignant look at three generations of women. Comprised of three different, but vaguely linked stories, it challenges the social and religious restrictions that Iranian culture imposes on its female members. The first story which gives the film its title, Hava turns nine and, in accordance with Islamic law, becomes a woman. She has just one hour left to say goodbye to her friend before she must return home to a life of seclusion. In the second story, an older girl enters a bicycle race. Ignoring the angry relatives who follow her on horseback, she keeps pedaling. In the third episode, an elderly woman goes on an absurd spending spree, setting up her possessions on the beach.

Instead of taking a heavy handed or overtly political stance, Meshkini lets her film-making do all the work, crafting these lyrical, haunting episodes into wonderful stories, great pieces of cinema and, above all, warmly human works.