These stirring vignettes, humorous and affecting, follow everyday people from all walks of life as they navigate the cultural, religious, and institutional constraints imposed on them by various social authorities.
In the first composition, a father is being chastised for not choosing a sufficiently Islamic name for his newborn son. The scene then switches to a little girl barely tolerating a hectoring saleswoman's patter as she's fitted for her school uniform: an abaya and veil, which swallows up her Mickey Mouse T-shirt and pink headphones. In the next, a teenage girl is interrogated by her school principal, who believes the girl was seen riding to school on a motorbike with a boy. A young woman is accused of driving without her hijab; another is interviewed for a position by a predatory company boss; a young man renewing his driver's license gets involved in an abusive charade with a bureaucrat with an interest in his tattooed body. One hundred and one stories from modern Iran.
"What's been happening in Iran has rendered everything to before and after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. There was a cinema before, and there will be a cinema after. We look at the streets. We look at our friends. We looked at our family. And we knew the time to tell a story around the fire was over. Now it's time to tell a story within the fire." (Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami)