Women Without Men / Looking for Oum Kulthum

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive two-night retrospective Looking Within, Not Without: The Films of Shirin Neshat. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

Women without Men follows the lives of four women over the course of the turbulent, American-backed overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. Though they each inhabit different strata of Iranian society—a general’s wife, a prostitute, a religious adherent and a rebellious sister—they each experience the personal trauma of patriarchal domination against a backdrop of sweeping historical change.

(2009, dir. Shirin Neshat & Shoja Azari, DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 89 min.)

Legendary singer and Egyptian national hero Oum Kulthum, whose impassioned voice was a beacon of hope for the Arab world for generations, is at the center of Shirin Neshat’s exploration of artistic interpretation and who gets to tell who’s story. Neda Rahmanian plays Mitra, an Iranian-born filmmaker shooting a biopic on Kulthum whose credentials to interpret her life are challenged at every turn.

(2017, dir. Shirin Neshat & Shoja Azari, DCP, color, in Persian with English subtitles, 90 min.)