l-daryaa I am an Iranian Woman and I live in Iran.I've read the reviews and messages and i think an actual Iranian Woman view will be useful for everyone.first of all this film dose not exaggerate at all.this is the real situation of women in my country.life is a closed circle without any escape for all the women here even for those few lucky ones who are from high and middle class society.it is a complex situation made by law,religion,culture and traditions. our society honestly is a lot like Orwel's 1984 dictatorship.you cant have an identity without having a man in your life .father,brother,husband.you can change it but you cant get rid of it otherwise you are without question guilty! Panahi did a great job showing the truth.with our country laws and limitations you should be very creative and smart to do such a thing. there is another think that some have misunderstood ,the grandma in the beginning of the film is sad and desperate for hes daughters future not because of the child being a girl.

GVA-2 A potent movie, portraying much that is now common knowledge among informed westerners. What was very significant to me was the emotional response it was able to elicit in me despite my prior knowlege of the place women have in many muslim countries. Not only a combination of frustration, anger and despair at the gross injustice perpetrated against women, but the pervasive tension and paranoia generated by a police state.I thank my lucky stars that I live in the West, with all its foibles.

dhandley Where's the Prozac?! After 90 minutes of one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, I felt lucky that I don't live in a country that treats half of its population so badly! Kudos to the film makers for their vision and temerity!

nunculus In Jafar Panahi's claustral feature debut, the brilliant central conceit is that being a woman in Iran is exactly equivalent to being the Wrong Man in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. In the movie's nameless Iranian city, the narrative baton is handed off from one woman to another, each of them missing an ID card, a chaperoning male, some form of social validation; without it, the long arm of the law winds around each woman like a python. Panahi's style--long, fluid takes that are at once bruisingly verite and dreamlike--buckles in the script's ingenious (and perhaps unconscious) major device: in this movie, women are a secret underworld with nodding, unspoken signals, just like hoodlums silently acknowledging one another in a gangster picture. There is no warm-hug sisterhood here, just the desperate mutual regard of the about-to-be-caught.The honesty and unfussiness of the style of contemporary Iranian directors enables them to get away with stuff other artists might not, such as the ending of this movie, which, in a European or American movie, might seem thuddingly unsubtle. Here, it seems like the fulfillment of a nightmare--and it works because of Panahi's wittily blunt style, which is pitched somewhere between Iranian neorealism and Elaine May's MIKEY AND NICKY. And it works because of our constant recognition of the literal, physical courage of the movie: our glimpses of current state attitudes toward abortion, prostitution and corrupt police are so bald one marvels at Panahi's (and the cast and crew's) effrontery. Never has chador seemed less exotic and more evil--a manifestation of a terror of the beauty and pleasure of the female body that seems to engulf each character like a Cronenbergian plague. (The movie's wittiest touch is Cronenbergian, too: a woman character has a tic that gives her away to the cops--pregnancy-induced vomiting.)