Filmmaker Jeff Kaufman profiles a modern heroine of human rights, currently still very much under fire in the Islamic world for courage and refusing to give in to the medieval and patriarchal mindset prevalent in modern Iran. Nasrin Sotoudeh is a crusading female trial lawyer who customarily takes the cases of abused children, juvenile delinquents, and persecuted wives—traditionally the losers in Iran's system of "justice" since the entire country took a Muslim religious-conservative turn after the 1979 revolution.
In addition, Nasrin has joined homegrown Iranian feminists in their social-media protests against local religious police and the forced wearing of hijabs. Her local fame has been such that she made a cameo appearance as herself in one of Iran cinema's many successful exports, the 2015 film Taxi by Jafar Panahi. The award-winning Panahi would wind up under arrest and banned from his profession, and the same fate would befall Nasrin Sotoudeh—twice.
In fact, she currently languishes in a well-known all-women's prison, and we hear audio of her heartrending phone calls placed to her heroically supportive husband Reza (a focus of government harassment himself) and their two children. While international news figures and commentators such as Christiane Amanpour, Anne Curry, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi comment on Nasrin and her work in interview segments, a substantial portion of this documentary was shot in Iran in secret by anonymous collaborators.
Many western viewers will be doubly surprised by what they see—not Tehran as a backward Third World city of huts and hovels (as one might well imagine Afghanistan) but rather a thoroughly modernized, high-tech, clean metropolis, one where Christmas remains a major shopping holiday. Yet, in this same cosmopolitan society, elections of hardcore Islamists mean that the rights of dissenters, especially women and the underaged, are routinely violated. This story is obviously an ongoing and still very disturbing one. While the leading lady speaks English (albeit haltingly), the preponderance of dialogue and narration is in Farsi, though actress Olivia Colman occasionally reads English-translated passages of letters and poetry related to Nasrin's exploits. Recommended. (Aud: H, C, P)