Women Without Men (2009)

Original title

زنان بدون مردان

Directed by

Shoja Azari, Shirin Neshat

Genre

drama film

Country

Iran, Germany, France, Austria

Runtime

1h 35m

Rated

12

Rating

6.3 of 10 from 52 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This film follows four women in Tehran during the 1953 coup that restored the Shah. Each woman struggles with the oppressive gender roles of the Islamic world, and their paths cross in unexpected ways.

visually lushmeditativemelancholiccontemplativeslow-burndreamlikesomberunsettling

What happens

Women Without Men is a 2009 film adaptation of the 1990 Shahrnush Parsipur novel, directed by Shirin Neshat. Neshat's work explores gender issues in the Islamic world. Women Without Men is her first dramatic feature. The film profiles the lives of four women living in Tehran in 1953, during the American-backed coup that returned the Shah of Iran to power. The film was called "visually transfixing" by The New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden, who added, "the film surpasses even Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon in the fierce beauty and precision of its cinematography (by Martin Gschlacht)." Two of the film's recurrent images are of a long dirt road extending to the horizon on which the characters walk, and a river that suggests, "a deep current of feminine resilience below an impassive exterior." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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