For her first film, THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN, Marziyeh Meshkini, the wife of Iran's most prominent filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, has crafted a mystical three-part allegorical vision of the treacherous cycle in which Iranian women are robbed of their freedom and dignity. In the first episode, a girl is informed on her ninth birthday that she can no longer play with or speak to boys and must begin to wear the traditional head-to-toe black body covering warn by Iranian women. In the second, a young woman feverishly competes in a visually stunning all-female bicycle race while pursued on horseback by her husband, family, and clan members, urging her to return to her responsibilities and duties, and eventually taking her bicycle from her. The protagonist in the final episode is a crippled old woman, lost in delusional fantasies, who hires a young child to assist her in buying all of the things that she lacked throughout her long and difficult life. While the plots are simple, the interweaving visual and conceptual motif of a life cycle of deprivation and humiliation creates a reflexive and elegant elegy to the struggles and poetic dignity of the Iranian woman.

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DVD Code: Region 1 US, CA

Genre: Dramas

Color: Color

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Region [unknown]

Fatemeh Cheragh Akhtar, Shabnam Toloui, Azizeh Seddighi

Marzieh Meshkini

"...[The film] creates a flow of symbolism so potent, so transporting in its physicality, that its impact all but transcends its [message]..."
Entertainment Weekly

"...Beautifully photographed....Hypnotic....[The film] shows great promise for a directing future..."
Box Office

"...Dazzling cinematography..."
Film Comment

"...Beautiful and poignant....There is such a sense of revelation in virtually every moment of this luminous film that it's amazing to consider all that happens and all its implications, some of it ironically symbolic..."
Los Angeles Times

"[T]he real highlight of the film is its middle stretch...A bold composition of sound and movement that is at once mesmerizingly abstract and viscerally affecting..."
Film Comment

"Meshkini's movie is so breathtakingly textural and so empathetic that it manages to transcend its context."
Sight and Sound