Divorce Iranian Style

The documentary was shot inside a divorce court in Iran. The camera watches the hearings and the women state their own cases in their own words. The limits the law draws and the ways the women find inside those limits are seen side by side. The film is neither an indictment nor a defence; it records what happens. The account sets itself against a view that reduces Iran to a single shape, and it says so plainly. The quickness and the humour of the women are among the things the film does not miss. The courtroom is the place where the personal and the legal sit at the same table. The seventy six minute documentary by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a joint British and Iranian production, was completed in 1998.