“Acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Manijeh Hekmat unfurls a beautifully paced, visually rich and emotionally insightful story about a family of three women. On a day that should be ordinary, Minoo, a museum rug conservator, sets out with her aging, senile mother to visit the doctor. Already distracted and fretting over her daughter Pegah, who’s simply dropped out of college and stopped taking calls, Minoo’s day completely deteriorates when she becomes embroiled in a professional battle over an antique rug. In the chaos, she loses both her mother and the rug. Minoo frantically searches Tehran for her family and the carpet, not knowing that Pegah has embarked on her own journey, camera in hand, through the Iranian countryside. Meanwhile, Minoo’s mother, clinging tightly to the precious rug, chases down her own past. Anchored by Niki Karimi’s stunning performance as Minoo, a lonely single mother struggling to balance familial responsibility, career and her own search for meaning, Hekmat’s film is part road movie, part fable and part family drama. Touched with sublime beauty, humor and heartbreaking tenderness, her vision of Iran as a place of fiercely independent women and unfathomable depths is stirring and inspiring.
Six years after her controversial debut feature, Women’s Prison, director Manijeh Hekmat returns with a powerful story about three generations of Iranian women 鈥� a mother, grandmother and granddaughter 鈥� each on their own search for meaning.
Born in 1962 in Arak, Iran, Manijeh Hekmat is a major figure in Iranian cinema. She began her career as an experimental filmmaker in 1978 and has since worked as an assistant director and production manager for more than 25 feature films, including the award-winning THE GIRL IN THE SNEAKERS (1999) and BUNCH OF GRASS (1999). Hekmat’s debut feature film, WOMEN’S PRISON (2002), is based on her own research on Iranian women prisoners and has been screened at more than 80 international film festivals and has received seven prizes. 3 WOMEN is Hekmat’s second film. Other films include NGOs in Iran (documentary, 2003), I Like My Room (documentary, 2004), Hundred Years Parliament in Iran (documentary, 2005), and Women Come Out of the House (documentary).”