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One of the leading female filmmakers in Iran, she was born in Tehran, in 1954, and studied film direction at the College of Dramatic Arts. She joined Iranian State Television as a script girl in 1973, then was promoted to assistant director, then producer and manager. During this time, her work gradually evolved into documentary filmmaking. Her first three features are comedies with a sharp eye for social satire. The central characters are the subjects of events to which they can only react. The women in these films are only background figures. But her later, more personal work, focuses on strong women under repressive social conditions. She often touches upon taboo subjects, such as poverty, crime and forbidden love. In Nargess, she pushes censorship codes to the limits, questioning the mores of society, showing desperate people overwhelmed by social conditions and a couple living together without being married. Her ensuing work, The Blue-Veiled, is about the forbidden love between an elderly man of means and a strong-headed young working class woman, who refuses to know «her place». Under the Skin of the City is a hymn to a mother’s love for her children and her determination to protect and forgive them in the face of social upheaval. |
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