Hava: Fatemeh Cherag Akhar	Cyclist: Shabnam Toloui
Elderly Woman: Azizeh Sedighi	Hassan: Badr Iravani
Director: Marzieh Meshkini

30 Second Bottom Line: Three stages of women's lives in Iran are examined. First as young girls, second as young married women, and last in the latter years of life. The struggle is to become a woman where freedom is free as she defines it. Each episode stands on it's own and in the end, all tie together.

Story Line: Hava (Fatemeh Cherag Akhar) is a young girl who learns only a few hours before she reaches her ninth birthday that she will no longer be able to play with her best friend Hassan (Badr Iravani), because he is a boy. She must also change from the freedom of her western style dress to long gowns and head wraps. Hava makes the most of the time left that she can spend with the young boy by cherishing their playful time together. In this culture instead of gaining more freedom as a young woman matures, she loses it.

In the second story, a young woman (Shabnam Toloui) is riding along a bike path near the ocean, being hassled by her husband who says she should not be riding a bike. As she rebukes him, he comes back time after time with various community leaders who finally excommunicate her because she is seeking a modicum of independence. It appears that only what the man thinks counts.

The last episode involves an old woman whose life is mostly behind her. She returns from another country, with plenty of money to spend, and begins buying things she could not have as a younger woman in Iran. Symbolically, she is telling us that unless things change, what good is it to have money if you must always live in the shadow of a man who tells you what you can or cannot do?

Tell Me More About It: This is a wonderful film by Marzieh Meshkini, a first time young female director from Iran. This stunning movie may sound like a chick flick, but it's much more than that. Women know how to treat men and it's about time that men learned how to treat women.

In some ways this quiet film has the energy of Run Lola Run. Both focus on what is happening in the mind of a woman while things are going on around her that will affect the rest of her life. It's more introspective than Lola, as it deals face to face with both a woman's freedom of thought as well as her actions. One striking moment occurs as Hava talks to Hassan in the waning minutes of their carefree friendship. Hassan is behind the window bars of his modest home located on the edge of the sea, while it is Hava, the young girl, on the open sand by the vast ocean who is imprisoned.

The ocean, with which we associate freedom, is a character in the film, as a common thread in each episode. The married cyclist rides along the ocean on a bike with all the latest gadgets, a symbol of the modern world, yet she is not allowed to think her own thoughts and do things that we take for granted. The last episode is the most imaginative of the three, as the elderly woman sets her newly purchased material possessions on a raft at the ocean, so she can escape…but to where?

Having recently seen Kadosh, a film set in Israel that also deals with the subject of female oppression in these modern times, it was impossible not to think for a moment that if the men in these two films are representative of that part of the world with resistance to change within their own families, it should come as no surprise that religious and cultural differences seem to provide the basis for eternal conflict between Muslims and Jews.

Like films made in China, those made in Iran often speak on multiple levels to avoid the censors. As those of us in the West learn about other cultures and what is going on today, it should also serve as a reminder that what is given, can often be taken away. Freedom is not free.