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Shop by Category Top 10 Records - Shahram Kashani
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The Hidden Half | 
| | List Price: | $29.95 | | Sale Price: | $19.95 | | You Save | $10 (33%) | | Item #: | hiddenhalf | | |
| About:
Made by Tahmineh Milani, one of Iran's most prominent woman directors, The Hidden Half stars Niki Karimi as Fereshteh, an upper-middle class housewife who was a campus radical during Iran's tumultuous cultural revolution in the early 1980's. When her husband, Atila Pesiani, a lawyer, is assigned to defend a woman who faces the death penalty, Fereshteh is moved to write him a letter telling him about her past for the first time in the hopes that the story of her life will help him to understand the plight of the woman he is defending and the inner life of his own wife. Through a series of flashbacks, the film relates Fereshteh's years as an underground Marxist student revolutionary and her affair with a suave writer who seduces her through deception. Milani's film brings to light a mostly hidden aspect of Iran's recent past while making a number of strong feminist points. — Tom Vick
Review:
A feminist statement told in melodramatic fashion, The Hidden Half is best known for of the controversy surrounding it. Its director, Tahmineh Milani, was arrested after it was made and, in a case of life imitating art, charged with a crime that could have carried the death penalty. Owing to an international outcry, and to Milani's popularity within Iran, she was released from prison, but the charges remain open. What aroused the ire of the conservative judges who ordered her arrest was the film's depiction of Iran's early-80's cultural revolution, a time of mass unrest among college students that resulted in the closure of Iran's universities for four years. The Hidden Half was the first movie to show these events in any detail. The film itself is something of a mixed bag. Its scenes of the cultural revolution era are fascinating, particularly in the way they show the prominent role of young women in the political underground, and the shocking punishments some of them suffered. But it falters in its melodramatic tone, which at times risks pitching the film into soap operatic self-parody. Niki Karimi plays her role with a heavy-handed seriousness that can be quite grating, and detracts at times from the film's most important, and relevant, statements about women, politics, and social relationships. But even with its flaws, The Hidden Half is one of the most forthrightly feminist mainstream films to have come out of almost any country — including the United States — in recent years. — Tom Vick
Farsi with English Subtitles. DVD Region 1 (US and Canada). 108 mins.
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