THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN

A young girl enjoys her last moments of unencumbered childhood before being fitted with a chador and all the gendered expectations that come with it. A wife joins a bicycle race with hundreds of other women, yet her husband still manages to find her amidst the crowd to deliver a conjugal harangue. An elderly woman stocks up for an afterlife’s worth of furniture and creature comforts at a beachside shopping mall. These three gently satiric, acidly serious sketches about the contradictions and constraints of sisterhood in Iran form the basis of THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN, the debut feature of Marzieh Meshkini, the wife of militant-turned-filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Meshkini’s venture was a literal family concern, a production of Makhmalbaf Film House, the putative film school whose handful of students were Makhmalbaf’s family and friends. After over a decade representing the leading edge of the Iranian New Wave on the festival circuit, Makhmalbaf had decided to take a step back, declaring that he had “stopped making films and decided to make filmmakers.” THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN bowed to acclaim at the Venice Film Festival and landed US distribution from The Shooting Gallery, a once-lauded indie company that shuttered within three months of the film’s stateside release amidst an ill-timed pivot to tech company pretensions. Distribution is ephemeral, art is eternal, and Meshkin’s film has been wandering the beach ever since. (KW)

"It's a poetic and minimalist journey of girls becoming and women in stages of undoing. A masterpiece of contemporary cinema." - Rooney Elmi, MUBI Notebook