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Persepolis
2008
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"Marjane (Mastroianni) is an innocent nine-year-old living in Iran, surrounded by a loving but incredibly protective mother (Deneuve) and father (Abkarian). She finds comfort in the carefree spirit of her loving grandmother (Darrieux), as well as music by artists as diverse as ABBA and Iron Maiden. When Marjane's uncle is killed in the Iran/Iraq war, her parents send her to school in Austria, where she can study in safety. Eventually, she returns home to Iran to be closer with her family. But even though she settles into married life, the tyrannical pressures of Iranian society force her to abandon her country once again, sending her to France on another journey." - (Alert)

After the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a free-spirited teenager is sent to school in Austria and eventually makes the decision to return to Iran despite the tyrannical powers that rule her country. - (Baker & Taylor)

Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken nine year old Marjane that we see a people's hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power - forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, she outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable. As she gets older, Marjane's boldness causes her parents to worry over her continued safety. And so, at age fourteen, they make the difficult decision to send her to school in Austria. Vulnerable and alone in a strange land, she endures the typical ordeals of a teenager. In addition, Marjane has to combat being equated with the religious fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape. Over time, she gains acceptance, and even experiences love, but after high school she finds herself alone and horribly homesick. Though it means putting on the veil and living in a tyrannical society, Marjane decides to return to Iran to be close to her family. After a difficult period of adjustment, she enters art school and marries, all the while continuing to speak out against the hypocrisy she witnesses. At age 24, she realizes that while she is deeply Iranian, she cannot live in Iran. She then makes the heartbreaking decision to leave her homeland for France, optimistic about her future, shaped indelibly by her past. - (Sony Pictures Home Enter)

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Iranian-born writer/artist Marjane Satrapi grew up in a comparatively liberal family during the final years of the Shah's dictatorship in the late 1970s and the early stages of the Islamic revolution that catapulted the Ayatollah Khomeini into power. Based on a series of graphic novels written by Satrapi (who co-directs here with Vincent Paronnaud), the Oscar-nominated animated Persepolis (presented here in both the original French and a new dubbed English version) follows Satrapi's childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, as she is sent (for her own safety) to attend school in Vienna, unhappily returns to Tehran (and a failed marriage), and eventually becomes an exile living in Paris. Featuring simple but elegant (if not always ideally expressive) b&w imagery, coupled with a deadpan, self-deprecating tone of spunkiness in the face of woe, Persepolis manages to mix light and dark subjects and a strong cast of characters—not just Marjane, who matures from a spirited young girl only half comprehending events to a young woman (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) looking back on her personal history—but also Marjane's mother (Catherine Deneuve) and especially her grandmother (Danielle Darrieux), both women of down-to-earth wisdom and indomitable spirit. Ultimately, we witness the tragedy of modern Iran, from royal despotism to religious rigidity, exacerbated by the horrors of the war with Iraq, reflected in the experience of a single family in a film that is witty, charming, and often genuinely poignant. Recommended. (F. Swietek) Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2008.

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