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The Female Touch in Iranian Film.

December 31, 2018 by Exangel

by Brian Griffith.

For some reason Iran has an unusually large number of great female film makers, such as Rakhshan Banietemad, Susan Taslimi, or Ziba Mir-Hosseini. Shirin Neshat, who is best known for her Silver Lion award-winning movieWomen Without Men (2009), tried to explain why this is true, mentioning the sense of constriction, the driven creativity, the satisfaction of a powerful voice, etc. Here’s a brief description of one such woman:

Tahmineh Milani is the director, producer, and screenwriter for over a dozen major films, many of them strongly feminist and highly controversial. Her films have won six international awards, two of them for best director, and two for best screenplay.

As an electrical engineering student in the late 1970s, Milani was a left-wing activist against the shah. After the universities temporarily closed to make the curriculum more Islamic in 1982, she joined a movie-making team and became assistant director for The Red Line. She had her first chance as lead director in 1989, with Children of Divorce, and then started producing internationally acclaimed films every year or two. In The Legend of a Sigh (1991), a woman sighs in despair at ever getting her writing published, and the sigh materializes into a figure who lets her switch at will between five different identities. In the 1992 movie What Did You Do Again?, a girl discovers the power to change her family just by talking to herself. Milani’s 1996 film Two Women follows the lives of two female friends who are separated, because one of them is forced to marry a jealous, controlling man. Conservative critics accused Milani of encouraging women to revolt. She said the critics were just scared that their own wives would riot after seeing the films.

In The Hidden Half (2001) a young woman joins a Marxist rebel group against the shah in the 1970s. After the revolution, she has to conceal her past, even from her husband after she gets married. Finally, however, she must reveal the hidden half of her life. When this film was released, the government charged Milani with counter-revolutionary propaganda and threw her in Evin prison for two weeks. After President Khatami intervened to release her, she wove accounts of the women she met in prison into the film Settling Scores (2007). In this movie, a group of women who are released from prison rent a house together and make a plan for revenge on men. Pretending to be prostitutes, they lure targeted men home, beat them up, rob them, and throw them out. Most authorities have regarded Milani as “extremely feminist,” but she is probably best known for her comedies such as What’s Up? (1991), which features a deeply emotional robot.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Winter 2019: Triggers.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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