Daughters of the Sun

Films about how desperate families in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran try to circumvent the severe restrictions placed upon women working outside the home by disguising their daughters as sons are becoming almost a cottage industry. One can point to 2001's deeply affecting Baran and 2003's powerful Osama as the best examples, but before either there was Maryam Shahriar's Daughters of the Sun (2000), an Iranian film which centers on Amanagol (Altinay Ghelich Taghani), a girl sent in the guise of a boy to a neighboring village to work in a rug-weaving shop and earn money to aid her ill mother. Here she meets Belgheis (Soghra Karimi), an orphan working in the same primitive factory (which one might call a sweatshop if the weather weren't so frigid); having lost all of her family in an earthquake, Belgheis becomes enamored of the newcomer she believes to be a young man, seeing him as her potential savior from an arranged marriage to a 60-year-old man. When her hopes aren't realized, more sadness follows. The uncompromising starkness of Daughters of the Sun is impressive, and its portrait of conditions in remote areas of Iran, where both governmental and religious authority seem to be absent, is compelling. But taken as a whole the film's loose structure and narrative opacity will somewhat limit its attraction to more mainstream audiences. Optional. (F. Swietek)