Acting
Lantouri is the name of a gang that mugs people in broad daylight on the streets of Tehran and breaks into homes in the city’s rich northern district. The gang also kidnaps children from families who have become wealthy through corruption and embezzlement of state funds. The film begins with the confessions of individual gang members. Sociologists, human rights activists and political hardliners also have their say. Gang member Pasha runs amok because Maryam, a socially committed, self-confident journalist, does not reciprocate his feelings. The badly injured young woman demands lex talionis – the law, applicable in Iran, of ‘an eye for an eye’.
A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.
Hanieh, a young teacher, lives in the household of her married sister in Tehran. Increasingly exhausted by her paralysing everyday life and the two-faced reality she subliminally experiences as a woman, an employee, a younger sister, and unhappy partner, Hanieh struggles to find her way out.
Various women struggle to function in the oppressively sexist society of contemporary Iran.
Setareh Asadi (Niki Karimi) is a young girl, who has gone to the house of a Qajar's Prince (Saeed Poursamimi) to be hired for nursing the prince's physically disabled son.... and this is the gate of what the story wants to tell about the society!
A theater directed by Amer Mosafer Astaneh
Young Hamed, arrested for handing out political tracts banned by the Islamic Republic, finds himself in a place of great suffering, in which illiterate and penniless orphans wash floors and sell their own blood. When a disease breaks out in the prison, his life within this harsh environment becomes progressively worse, a near-daily fight for survival.
Forough Farrokhzad, one of Iran's greatest modern poets, provoked uproar by daring to write of female sensuality in the face of society's traditional values. Her awakening found expression in poetry, theatre, and cinema, enabling art, as she saw it, to be a 'window through which we see ourselves sing, shout and cry'.
