Wednesday, July 3 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN
Directed by Marzieh Meshkini • 2000
In Farsi with English subtitles
A young girl enjoys her last moments of unencumbered childhood before being fitted with a chador and all the gendered expectations that come with it. A wife joins a bicycle race with hundreds of other women, yet her husband still manages to find her amidst the crowd to deliver a conjugal harangue. An elderly woman stocks up for an afterlife’s worth of furniture and creature comforts at a beachside shopping mall. These three gently satiric, acidly serious sketches about the contradictions and constraints of sisterhood in the Islamic Republic form the basis of The Day I Became a Woman, the debut feature of Marzieh Meshkini, the wife of fundamentalist-militant-turned-filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Meshkini’s venture was a literal family concern, a production of Makhmalbaf Film House, the putative film school whose handful of students were Makhmalbaf’s family and friends. After over a decade representing the leading edge of the Iranian New Wave on the festival circuit, Makhmalbaf had decided to take a step back, declaring that he had “stopped making films and decided to make filmmakers.” (Among the other Film House productions were The Apple and Blackboards from Makhmalbaf’s daughter Samira.) The Day I Became a Woman bowed to acclaim at the Venice Film Festival and landed US distribution from The Shooting Gallery, a once-lauded indie company that shuttered within three months of the film’s stateside release amidst an ill-timed pivot to tech company pretensions. Distribution is ephemeral, art is eternal, and Meshkin’s film has been wandering the beach ever since. (KW)
78 min • Makhmalbaf Film House • 35mm from Chicago Film Society collections, permission Makhmalbaf Film House
Preceded by: “Vau Vau” (Boris Kolar, 1964) – 9 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: Mantrap on Sunday, July 14 at the Music Box
