Roozi ke zan shodam

Nothing against the American industry, but if you are looking for a Hollywood type of movie try something else. Yes, there is plenty of beauty and fantasy, but not in the American fashion. Here the stories and people and places are very simple (and very deep). Yet, the fantasy is so real that you can very easily transpose it to your own life, regardless if you came from Middle East, Japan or Americas. Well, as long as you have some brains and some subtlety. After I saw this movie I spent weeks thinking about it,and I learned so much. Every single detail of the story, camera work and sound has a meaning.

I read a magazine review critic complaining the movie was boring, specially the first story, in which the girl (according to that critic review) was a very bad actress, concerned about not playing that day, but not showing emotions for what her life was going to be. Does a nine year old girl understand what is "becoming a woman"? Of course not, her understanding was limited to that moment when she was being forbidden to play with her best friend. This is exactly what made the story so universal, I could remember myself (raised on an environment with freedom for women) waiting for the permissions of my mother, desperately waiting for the time of the adults. And inside the critical context of the movie, her lack of understanding of what her life was going to become was also very important. Inside that real life drama, people take care of their everyday lives, and go on. Oh, and so many other meanings and symbols just in this first story. The wind and water (also present in the other two stories), the plastic fish by which she exchanges her chaddor, her little time passing away and she unable to use it and still waiting, her availability, the lollipop teasing across the bar separating her from her boy friend (the *given* pleasure the only control left to her), her mother coming to pick her up, etc.

The other two stories are as good and universal. Even if you live inside a women's lib society, even if you are a man. This movie is a work of art. So, it demands sensibility for understanding it. If you are looking for fast food entertainment, forget about it.

It was, in some ways, a strange film. Its' use of symbolism, combined with the mystery of incomplete plots gave it a unique look, and oddly made the film better than it probably is. There are folks who won't care much for this film, but I found it a charming and poignant look at the status of women in Islamic nations. How tradition is clashing with changing times.

I liked the first segment best, because of it's sweet sadness. I next like the third segment, because the old lady was quite charming. And though I did like the middle segment, I found it the hardest to follow and understand.

This isn't a great film, but it is a very good one. Technically it's below what I've come to expect from a film, but it conveys it's message well and does so with bittersweet sadness which works well for this film. It may be an Iranian "feminist" movie, but it's worth a look.

This is a beautifully shot, richly textured film. Its decidedly surrealist elements do not detract from its poignant central message: that the arbitrary social conventions which govern womens' lives in Iran are inherently absurd. What is so striking about this film is the way in which the director brings out this element of absurdity by transplanting an Iranian narrative onto the bizarre setting of Kish Island, a free trade zone and resort off the coast of Iran. The women in the film are all forced to play out the roles assigned for them by Iranian society, despite the virtual absence of the state, which is so often demonized in treatments of Iranian women's lives.

On the surface this film tells three simple stories, but its simplicity is deceiving. Each story tells an episode in the life of a woman but as the woman ages the stories become more and more surreal. In so doing Marzieh Meshkini is making a parallel with the life of Iranian women.

Absolutely stunning. On the surface it's a triptych of short stories showing a girl, young wife, and old woman in Iran, but it plays as allegory, and the way it's executed by director Marzieh Meshkini is masterful. She shows great restraint and precision in everything she does, delivering a message with enough ambiguity to make the viewer ponder, and yet clearly showing the constraints of being a woman in a male-dominated society. The middle story in particular was as poetic and profound an expression of the patriarchy as I've ever seen; it was simply breathtaking. This is a film that should be far better known and seen; seek it out.