Razor’s Edge: The Legacy of Iranian Actresses

The culture and art of Iran, like those of nations throughout history, have always been inextricably tied to its societal problems, including its attitudes and treatment of women. Its cinema was not an exception. In a traditional, religious and male-dominated society, actresses dared to assert themselves within the relatively new art form, sacrificing to force acceptance of their presence in the cinema and subsequently bring modernity to the culture. This documentary approaches its subject on four levels: the biographical, the historical, the socio-political and the theoretical. Through interviews with many leading actresses of the time and unprecedented access to rare film clips of their work, filmmaker Bahman Maghsoudlou sheds a light on the important and controversial role women played in the development of Iranian cinema during the secular period from the 1930s right up to the Islamic revolution of 1979, examining the evolution of women’s roles, the difficulty of making films that broke from the patriarchal mode and the darkness that descended upon the arts when a new fanaticism began to take hold of the nation.