ByTowne ByTowne Cinema
ByTowne Cinema
325 Rideau St. Ottawa K1N 5Y4
Info Line: (613) 789-FILM
Circumstance
Print this pageAudience Award ~ Best Drama ~ Sundance Film Festival
Showtimes:
No screenings currently scheduled.
Circumstance is an amazingly accomplished and complex first feature from Iranian-American writer-director Maryam Keshavarz.
Drawing on some of her own experiences, she has created an insiders look at a world few of us will ever get to see. The political, sexual and religious labyrinth of Iran today feels at once contemporary and utterly foreign.
Keshavarz’s looking glass is a liberal, well-to-do family in Tehran, and in particular 16-year-old Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and her less privileged friend Shireen (Sarah Kazemy). Like any girls their age, they are testing the bonds of friendship and their sexual attraction for each other, made even more complicated by a repressive society that has little regard for women. They act out their rebellion by taking drugs and partying in hip-looking underground clubs, but their only real escape is through their imagination. Life is so stifling in Iran that they picture themselves running off to the relative freedom of Dubai.
All of Atafeh’s family has been affected by the totalitarian regime. Her once progressive, Berkeley-educated father Firouz (Soheil Parsa) is nostalgic for his glory days while compromising in the present. Her mother Azar (Nasrin Pakkho) is a successful surgeon but nonetheless reminds her daughter that we have to accept the reality we live in. Most damaged of all is her brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai). A crack addict recently released from jail, he is desperately looking for a way to fit in to society.
For obvious reasons, Keshavarz shot the film in Lebanon, and even there she had to stretch the bounds of what was acceptable. Having grown up in the U.S. and Iran, she is able to look at the culture from the inside and has a keen eye for the telling image or subtle gesture. In one striking scene at the seaside, she frames a group of men lounging in bathing suits seated next to women in their black hijabs.
Keshavarz has managed to create distinct and individual characters on both sides of the political spectrum. In this she is aided by fine performances from relative newcomers Boosheri and Kazemy as the teenage girls, and the sympathetic grace of Iranian stage veterans Parsa and Pakkho as the parents. Together the director and her cast have managed to give the film a sense of complete authenticity. Circumstance is an impressive debut from a filmmaker with something to say and the talent to say it.
– James Greenberg, The Hollywood Reporter
The ByTowne doesn't have a parking lot of its own, but denizens of downtown can usually find street parking close by fairly easily.
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