AllMovie

Rusegar-e ma (Our Times) is an Iranian docu-fiction piece focusing on the lives of several Iranian women throughout the presidential elections of 2001. Director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, one of Iran's most respected feminist filmmakers, chose to work with two groups of women, one old and one young, to contrast divergent political attitudes across the generation gap. At one end of this spectrum is the director's real life daughter and a group of her artist friends who have formed a committee to support the incumbent, President Khatami. On the other end is a group of forty-eight older women running for office on a reform party ticket, this despite being thrown off the ballot by an all-male government. The thread that keeps these two stories together is the tale of Arezoo Bayat and her daughter who are simply trying to scratch out living amid the headier issue of the elections. All tolled, a pretty compelling portrait of life as a Iranian woman at the turn of the 21st century.