CircumstanceStoryline / Description:

A rich family from Iran goes through a lot of trouble to avoid the growing sexual desires of a teenager and the dangerous obsession of her brother.

Synopsis:

Siblings Atafeh and Mehran are privileged and wealthy kids that grew up in a house that is showered with art, music and intellectual stimulation. But Tehran sinks into drugs and when he gets out of rehab, he swears to let go of his former irresponsible life, and swaps it with his previous classical music practice but this time, with destructive pursuits.

Running Time: 107 minutes

Distributor: Roadside Attractions

Directed By: Maryam Keshavarz

Written By: Maryam Keshavarz

Cast: Sarah Kazemy, Nikohl Boosheri and Reza Sixo Safai

Movie Release Date: August 26, 2011


Review:

Circumstance’s elaborate casualness with its surroundings can be energizing, genuinely conquering the ulterior subculture that booms beneath the nation’s more ascetic exterior. Initially, that naturalism also reaches to its projection of Atafeh’s life, particularly with reference to her tender rapport with her mighty, music-adoring dad Firooz (Soheil Parsa). Denying to situate him as a ready-made impersonation of dominating masculinity, Keshavarz alternatively introduces Firooz as an affectionate if fundamentally compromised image, a guy who thinks of his adolescent experiences are like his girl’s, and whose abstract notion of equality—in an offhand comment, announces a hope for that day when he could swim in the sea as his “little girl”—is perplexed by urging peer pressures. Firooz, on the other hand, in spite of being commonly demoted to the borders, demonstrates tempting nuances, and no such involution describes the intensifying drama that stalks out from the coming of Mehran, Atafeh’s brother, a once-promising instrumentalist that just got out of drug rehab and whose reception to addiction gets to fundamentalism, and every scheming effort appears measured to boost the movie’s substance at the disbursal of credibility.

This film won a 2011 Sundance Audience Award through Maryam Keshavarz, the writer-director who is an Iranian-American. The movie is an American-produced launching feature film about the desire for freedom and its aftermaths in a repressing society. In this movie, love and sensuality between two teenaged women put their lives on a tangled course with the Tehran society and one girl’s highly-troubled, insanely religious brother.