The Sigla Blog

I haven’t stopped thinking about Prostitution behind the Veil since watching it last night on BBC4. Part of the Storyville series, the film-maker Nahid Persson fled her native Iran after the Revolution. Now resident in Sweden, she has returned many times to the country to record what’s happening in contemporary Iran. In last night’s documentary, she tells the story of two women, Mina and Fariba, whose husbands are in jail and both women, who are drug addicts, have been forced to turn to prostitution to survive. Both have children and Mina, desperate for money almost agrees to a ’sigeh’, a contract-like temporary marriage in Islam that can last from “a few mintues to 99 years”.
Implicit in the film is that the women’s plight is not just to do with Islam’s Shari’a law, but specifically to do with gender and the structures of a patriarchal society. Either way, the viewer is left in no doubt as to the lack of options for many women, especially young girls who leave home, in modern Iran.

Still pondering the film this morning, I caught up on my feed reads, and was quite heartened to come across this.

“Iran has chosen Cafe Transit, a film which defends women’s rights in the Islamic Republic, as its official contender for next year’s best foreign film Oscar… Partovi is well known for her polemics against the subordination of women, having previously written the 2000 Golden Lion winner Circle and 2002’s I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old.”

The film has also won the International Critics Prize and the Best Film award at Dhaka International Film Festival (more info here:)

On a totally different tack, this got me thinking - when was the last time a female film-maker won an Oscar? Apart from collaborative or team efforts, the only ones I can think of are Jane Campion for The Piano and and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (both were nominated for Best Director, but won for screenplay) and Patty Jenkins, who received a nomination for Monster.