Women Without Men

"I do believe that cinema is a more democratic form," says New York-based Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat, comparing feature films with video art. Neshat, whose first feature, Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan), has its final screening today as part of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, is best known for her exquisite video installations that poetically examine gender, culture and politics with the artist's distinct photographic eye. However, several years ago Neshat began the long process of adapting Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur's book of the same name into a screenplay, which entailed finding a balance between traditional narrative storytelling and more enigmatic abstraction. The resulting film exhibits Neshat's striking visual sensibility, and invites viewers to follow several female characters through the complex political context of 1950s Iran. Neshat says she worked hard to to honor the magical realism of the novel, a complex interweaving of several storylines, and the clarity that would make the film enjoyable. "Feature films as a form are more open to audiences, and although I have a part of me that is an activist and rebels against the idea of the commodity, I love the idea that when people go to the movie theater and sit for two hours they will be entertained." She continues, "For me as an artist it's been an exciting task to see if I could tell a story that is interesting, thought-provoking and moving, and that would satisty an audience's expectations without compromising the aesthetic vision." Neshat succeeds, challenging viewers to keep pace with shifts in point of view while immersing us in a sumptuous aesthetic attentive to light, sculptural form, movement and framing. Neshat, who earned the Silver Lion for best director for the film at the Venice Film Festival last fall, says she has been invited to screen Women Without Men in LA in the coming months - watch for it!