Hilarious, tragic, stirring, fly-on-the-wall look at several weeks in an Iranian divorce court provides a unique window into the intimate circumstances of Iranian women’s lives. Following Jamileh, whose husband beats her; Ziba, a 16-year-old trying to divorce her 38-year-old husband; and Maryam, who is desperately fighting to gain custody of her daughters, this deadpan chronicle showcases the strength, ingenuity, and guile with which they confront biased laws, a Kafaka-esque administrative system, and their husbands’ and families’ rage to gain divorces.
With the barest of commentary, acclaimed director Kim Longinotto turns her cameras on the court and lets it tell its own story. Dispelling images of Iran as a country of war, hostages, and “fatwas”, and Iranian women as passive victims of a terrible system, this film is a subtle, fascinating look at women’s lives in a country which is little known to most Americans. Directed by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, author of MARRIAGE ON TRIAL: A STUDY OF ISLAMIC FAMILY LAW.
About The Filmmakers: Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini
Kim Longinotto is one of the UK's leading documentary directors whose body of work
explores women's lives and their struggles for autonomy and human rights in a range of
international cultural contexts. Her strategies interrogate the observationalist traditions of
documentary cinema and visual anthropology to produce engaged and profoundly
empathetic feminist films. She works in collaborative ways with her subjects, often with other directors, to represent the contradictions and multiple layers of their lives and political and social situations.
Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist, specializing in Islamic law, gender and
development. She has a BA in Sociology from Tehran University (1974) and a PhD in Social
Anthropology from University of Cambridge (1980). She is Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, University of London. She has held numerous research fellowships and visiting professorships, including a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004-5), and Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at New York University (2002-8).
Her publications include Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and
Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002), Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in
Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999), (with Richard Tapper) Islam and
Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2006), (with Vanja
Hamzic) Control and Sexuality: the Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts (Women Living Under Muslim Laws, 2010), Men in charge? Rethinking Authority in Muslim Legal Tradition, edited with Mulki Al-Sharmani and Jana Rumminger (Oneworld, 2015). She has also directed (with Kim Longinotto) two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran: Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and Runaway (2001).
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