Zendan-e Zanan

"Zendan-e Zanan" is the story of the daily life – over twenty years – of several women imprisoned for acts qualified as misdemeanours by the successive political regimes in Iran. At the heart of this collective portrait that mirrors the general evolution of the customs and ideas of the country, shines the surprising duo, whose complicity grows over the years, of the woman who directs the prison and one of the prisoners – who is freed in the end. It is a strange thing, this film whose plot appears rather thin a priori, since the only setting is that of an enclosed prison, and the only motor to keep the narrative going is the time that passes there. How is it that the result is nevertheless enthralling? Firstly because it is subtly fashioned from scenes that never cease to unveil each other – like folding-screens rotating on their axis and gradually ramifying the scene; secondly because nothing is ever over-played by the actresses nor over-shown by the director (a woman). Thus each scene of the film, each detail of each image and each syllable callously uttered take on the density of a fatal reality, to the extent of mutating the fiction of "Zendan-e Zanan" into a means of prodigious documentation on a given moment in modern Iran.