Women's Prison

When Iranian filmmaker Manijeh Hekmat dared to propose making a film about the deplorable lives of women behind bars—some of them political prisoners—in post-revolutionary Iran, she was slapped down by the Iranian Society of Film Directors, which denied her a permit to begin production. So she resubmitted her request in the name of her art-director husband and made the film anyway...only to see it banned in her home country. But bootleg copies found their way into the outside world, after which the film had a triumphant premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2002. Women's Prison is a daring, angry work, an instant classic of political muckraking that exposes the decay and corruption at the heart of Iranian civil society, challenging rigidly dogmatic concepts about both the place of women and the meaning of dissent, while also laying bare the vicious cycle of lost generations raising lost children (these women actually take care of their kids—incarcerated beside them—amidst the prison squalor). Unfolding over two decades, the film—which revolves around a woman, convicted of murdering her abusive stepfather, who regularly defies the inflexible warden—offers a shocking and illuminating look at a world unfamiliar to Western audiences. Highly recommended. (M. Johanson)