Washington, DC – How can you be an Iranian artist without addressing politics? You can’t, or at least that’s what Shirin Neshat, Iranian-American director of Women Without Men, would say. Women Without Men, Neshat’s first feature length film, follows the lives of four Iranian women as they struggle to escape the misery of their daily lives. Based on the novella of the same name by Shahrnush Parsipur, the movie is set against the backdrop of the 1953 coup that replaced the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with the exiled Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
