Cinematical

For Americans to better understand our present conflict with Iran, we need to look at the history of our involvement and interests there. And for that, we need a movie. That is how the award-winning photographer Shirin Neshat sees it anyway. She is planning her feature film debut to be set in 1953, the year the CIA was involved in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and she hopes to show how this event figures into the current relationship between the west and the middle east. It won't be the first time a film maker presents the past as a parallel or a cause for the present, but the subject matter may specifically remind people of the most controversial points of Fahrenheit 9/11, in which Michael Moore insinuates that 9/11 was somewhat America's own fault.

The film, which Neshat has yet to pin a name on (it will be based on the book Women Without Men), will not be the same kind of propaganda that Moore's doc is, and it isn't likely to be all that pro-Iran, either. Neshat, who moved to America in the mid-'70s to attend UC Berkeley and is presently living in New York, has not been to Iran in ten years because her work on gender roles in Islamic society is not very popular back home. Of course, this film could make her just as unwelcome in parts of the U.S. too.