Terrestrial Verses

Women Life Freedom
(آیه های زمینی
Ayeh haye zamini)
dirs.: Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami
2023
Iranian films. I review a fair few Iranian films. It’s probably still the tiniest fraction of flicks that are made and exported each year, because the ones I hear about are the ones that tour the festival circuit and occasionally win prizes or enough good reviews for them to come to my scattered attention.
To put it in the laziest, most cultural appropriation kind of way, I love their culture, I love their cinema history, and I abhor their theocratic and above all cruel totalitarian regime. Unlike other flicks that got international acclaim in the last couple of years, like Seed of the Sacred Fig, this flick doesn’t directly say the monstrous regime turns families against each other and tries to choke the life out of all, not just the womenfolk.
It takes a more oblique path, expressing a sometimes comical exasperation and disbelief rather than horror, but it’s powerful nonetheless. In nine vignettes it shows how the regime turns anyone in the slightest position of authority into a petty tyrant against their fellow citizens, getting them to inflict bureaucratic horrors even if they’re not part of the superstructure of control that is imposed upon all life in Tehran and beyond.