A Place Called Home

This is an intriguing, if not quite successful, attempt at video autobiography. Intriguing, because filmmaker Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri offers an image of herself as a much-conflicted product of two largely conflicting cultures, Iran and the United States. Not quite successful because, I suspect, the 30-minute limitation within which her work is framed is too short to allow her to present convincing groundwork for her self-identified cultural conflicts. Raised in pre-Revolutionary Iran, in comfortable circumstances, as a Westernized child and teenager, Sadegh-Vaziri left Iran to attend college in the U.S. During her years in the U.S., she experienced hostility toward Iranian-Americans and a sense of displacement that, eventually, she relieved by returning to Iran for an exploratory visit. This visit resulted, ultimately, in her close identification with her Islamic and Iranian roots and her decision to remain in Iran. The video is enjoyable, if somewhat choppy, and definitely rushed. Another half-hour might have afforded Sadegh-Vaziri the time to explore the hostility and resentment she encountered as a Westernized Iranian woman and to explain more clearly how and why she so quickly and freely identified with the post-Revolutionary, conservative Islamic role of woman in Iran. Lacking the depth that seems warranted by the topic, this is an optional purchase. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Rechel)