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.