

The textbook definition of a good citizen is a person who works hard, helps others and respects the law. A night minivan driver witnesses a crime and chases the robber down an alley and confronts him. A bloody fistfight ensues. But when the shot cuts to his close-up in the confined space of the interrogation room, we find him looking ragged and unkempt, trying hard to give a coherent account of what had happened to a hostile plain clothes cop, wondering if it pays to be a good citizen when one becomes punished for one’s own good intentions.
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
CN
As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.