The shots of the dirt road from Tehran to the orchard illustrate the class differences among the women. The women’s journeys to the orchard are important to Neshat rather than skipping to the arrival of each woman, she includes long shots of each woman’s journey down the road. Unlike the others, Munis stays in the city in her ghostly form, she is percieved only by a Communist Party member whom she befriends, and as such is finally able to get involved with political activity. Once there, they develop bonds, facilitated by the wealthy Fakhri, who buys the orchard’s estate and acts as a caregiver to ailing Zarin, as well as to Faezeh after she is assaulted in Tehran. They are each, however, in the midst of a conflict or change caused by a man in their life and each solves the problem in the same way, by making her way to an orchard outside of Tehran. Save for Munis and Faezeh’s friendship, the women are apparently separate in the first segment of the film. She gets into a fight with her husband, the honoree, and leaves him rather unceremoniously. The camera switches to a military ceremony where we meet Fakhri ( Arita Shahrzad), the oldest and wealthiest of the four women. Afterwards, the scene shifts sharply to meet Zarin (Orsi Toth), a solemn prostitute, who flees from her brothel after seeing a customer with no face – another dip into the surreal. It becomes clear that Faezeh has a crush on Amir Khan, who is engaged to someone else. ” Shortly thereafter, we meet Munis’s friend Faezeh ( Pegah Ferydoni), who comes to visit when Amir Khan is away. With her vague commentary, she helps to generalize the themes for viewers: “ Through all this noise, there was almost silence…the sense that everything repeats itself over time. Munis becomes the film’s primary magical-realist thread, acting as omnipresent narrator.

We are first introduced to Munis (Shabnam Tolouei ), a radiophile who is disinterested in the marriage prospects her brother, Amir Khan, is forcing onto her. The film, an adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1990 novella, distills the political situation into a compelling story about a group of women whose parallel experiences lead them to the same location despite differences in class and lifestyle.

In her 2009 film Women Without Men, Shirin Neshat tells the female story during the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran.

Shirin in shahrzad series