Neda Amiri

A short documentary on the latest film by Mania Akbari titled, From Tehran to London. The film takes a closer look at Akbari’s latest boundary-pushing film that displays females dancing for the first time in Iranian cinema after the revolution. Through the lens of critical analysis with a touch of Freudian psychoanalysis, the documentary comments on how the themes of dance, death, homosexuality, censorship and devastation come to light through the actor’s dialogues and symbols in the film.

Mania Akbari’s From Tehran to London (2012), has a Russian-doll structure. It begins with Akbari shooting her latest film entitled Women Do Not Have Breasts about a couple, the young poet and writer Ava and her upper-class older husband Ashkan, who live in a large, beautiful – yet isolated – house in the hilly outskirts of the city. Household workers Maryam and Rahim attend to their needs. But despite their comfortable lives, Ava is increasingly dissatisfied and estranged in her relationship with Ashkan. What seems to have been an exciting relationship in the past is now little more than a series of mutual reproaches, as Ashkan incessantly tries to change Ava into someone she isn’t – a dutiful wife.

In a society where all social customs are based on the beauty of a woman, her challenge is to find self confidence and inner beauty despite having lost her physical beauty.