Walker Film on Demand presents Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men, streamed to your home computer. With help from Indiepix, the film can now be streamed live at www.womenwithoutmenfilm.com/walker. For $5.99, anyone in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa or Wisconsin can stream the film, they might have missed, or watch it again. This feature is available through June 30th.
The after-screening discussion with director Shirin Neshat and Co-Director Shoja Azari is also posted here, on the Walker Channel.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CGxQlcrlYw[/youtube]
Shirin Neshat’s staggering film showed at the Walker on Friday, April 16th and Saturday April 17th to sold out audiences.
Description by Sara Saljoughi:
Women Without Men — Neshat’s first feature film — is an adaptation of Iranian novelist Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel by the same title. Neshat’s fascination with Parsipur’s novel and her own exploration of the literary work’s intrinsic visual qualities were evident in her Zarin Series (2005), a collection of photographs inspired by one of the novel and film’s main characters, Zarin. Women without Men hones in on the life of four women – Zarin, Faezeh, Munis and Fakhri – in one of the most politically tumultuous times in modern Iranian history, the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Neshat’s adaptation of Parsipur’s novel manages to perform a striking interpretation of the written work’s elements of magical realism.
The film’s muted palette, which is at moments reminiscent of Kodachrome photographs, takes us away from “realism,” something which has almost come to be expected from Iranian filmmakers, into a world that is seemingly discordant with the one we know, both in the realm of the physical and the emotive.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.