The Hidden Half (2001)

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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 1980s. When her husband, Atila Pesiani, a lawyer, is assigned to… More 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 1980s. 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, Rovi