Of Oil and Women

Iranian-American artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat on the Green Revolution:

Below, the trailer for her first feature, Women Without Men, about the 1953 CIA-led coup which brought in the Shahs. As you might guess, it was all about the oil.

But first, this from the Huffington Post:

Women Without Men describes the lives and fates of four women who belong to different social classes: a prostitute, an upper-class married woman, an activist, and a devout woman whose only dream is to get married and have children. All four live an exiled life in their own country, where they struggle for an identity in 1950's deeply patriarchal Iran. It was an era in which growing up female meant deference to authority and power, and being trapped in limited gender roles. These women form their own utopia in a garden, where they try to reconstruct their lives. As Neshat keenly remarks, "these women go into a second self-imposed exile to get a new start."

It used to be all about oil, and maybe is again.

But one thing's sure, it is still about the women.