Divorce Iranian Style

Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini’s intimate, eye-opening documentary, set in Tehran’s divorce court, gives a fascinating insight into the state of urban marriage in Iran under Islamic law, focusing on women’s petitions (their grounds are restricted to claims of their husband’s impotence, insanity or deception). In the characters of the long-serving (and suffering) judge, secretary, etc, this gives an interesting personalisation of relative flexibility in comparison with more fundamentalist Islamic countries or rural areas (the chador-ed women here are extremely vocal, explicit and candid, despite their distress); but there’s still enough pain and injustice here to make even the most anti-feminist viewer pause.