"The day I became a woman" in U.S. theaters
THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN is a beautiful triptych depicting three stages
in a woman's life. It marks the debut of first time director Marzieh Meshkini's.
Alternately funny, surreal and heartbreaking and filled with breathtaking
imagery, the film features a script by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the masters
of the new Iranian Cinema.
It has received numerous awards including the Best First Film prize
at the 2000 Venice and Chicago Film Festivals, Best Director at the Thessaloniki
Film Festival and Best Film (Asian Filmmakers) at the Pusan Film Festival.
It will open in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco on April 6th.
In Los Angeles it will be showing at the Loews Cineplex's Fairfax Theatre
at the corner of Beverly and Fairfax.
In the first chapter of the film we are introduced to Havva, a young
girl, on the day of her 9th birthday. She is told that as of noon, the
hour of her birth, she has become a woman and must play by a different
set of rules. She coaxes one more hour of freedom out of her mother and
grandmother.
The second vignette follows a woman's bicycle race that for one young
woman, Ahoo, becomes a race for her life. As she rides her bicycle, she
is persistently pursued her husband, her in-laws, and the elders of their
clan, all on horseback and all of whom remind her, increasingly threateningly,
that if she continues the race she will suffer drastic consequences.
In the final sequence an elderly wheelchair-bound woman assisted by
a youth visits the massive duty-free stores of Kish Island and accumulates
all manner of goods and appliances.
The three sequences come together as the old woman waits on the beach
to load her treasures onto a boat that is to take her home. The film yields
a testimony that is at once poetic and powerful to the experience of Iranian
women, limited as they are in their choices in daily life.
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