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Women Without Men

Women Without Men

There has been no shortage of powerful films about the condition of women in the Muslim world. Such films as 2003's "Osama" and 2008's "The Stoning of Soraya M." paint a bleak and infuriating picture of cultural conventions that are blind to the humanity of half of humanity.

But there's something in all these films that feels hortatory, as if they were made to persuade us to political action: It's the message that ultimately counts, not the movie.

"Women Without Men" is different. Not that it paints a rosy picture of the lot of Iranian women, but instead of declamation, there is poetry. It isn't carefully argued but, rather, it seduces us with imagery and metaphor.

Made by the Iranian-American exile team of Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari from a 1990 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, it follows four Iranian women to an overgrown orchard that one of them has bought and turned into a private sanctuary to escape the predations and oppression of men.

Every frame of the film seems carefully composed, as if it were a painting to stand on its own, and color has been jiggered, sometimes suppressed, sometimes exaggerated. It moves at the pace of a dream. Elements of magical realism keep the story from becoming literal: We have to read this as a poem, not a novel.

The result is that the movie has become universalized: Instead of a political tract about Iran, it becomes a meditation on the contrasting worlds of men and women.

The men live in a world of rules and injunction. Everything they say or do is dictated by outward expectation. The world they live in is a world of words. It is a construction. And it severely limits the men, to say nothing of the women under their control.

The women, in contrast, see the words as an unnecessary layer between them and the world. For the women, the essential thing is compassion, for each other and, ultimately, even for the men. Compassion is a direct interaction with the world, not one buffered by any intellectualized and distancing model.

There is a good deal of pain in this world, and compassion is the only pure coin of the realm.

But more important, it means the story isn't a localized tale of injustice but a universal description of two essential ways of interacting with the world.

The film speaks to any of us: You have only to look at cable-TV pundits to see how ideas about the world have replaced the actual world, and how ideology makes us dumb.

— R. Nilsen, Arizona Republic

Women Without Men

Thu & Fri October 28 & 29, 2010, 7:00 & 9:00, Muenzinger Auditorium

Germany | Austria | France, 2009, in Persian | Persian, Color, 95 min

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

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Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

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(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

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Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

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