A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night...
The photo above is from the film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night–a “Middle Eastern feminist vampire romance” that was filmed in Farsi but shot in California. The sound track for this unusual and haunting film includes underground bands from Iran like Kiosk and Radio Tehran.
The trailer below is for Sepideh (or Reaching for the Stars)–a documentary about an Iranian girl who’s hooked on Albert Einstein and the stars. Though she dreams of joining the young men who journey deep into the desert to gaze at the sky, her conservative family members try everything they can to keep her home.
The last film is Appropriate Behavior, which is based on the life of its director and star–Desiree Akhavan, a gay Iranian American living in New York. In the video below, she introduces her hipster-style coming-out comedy that takes place in Brooklyn (naturally). The film is similar to her web series The Slope…
As you can see, the three “Iranian” films that were shown this year at Sundance are really diverse in topic and tone–and they present different angles of Iranian culture than the one-dimensional portrayal we usually see in the news…
