Zanyar Mohammadi

The imprisoned Iranian women’s rights activist Maryam is allowed to meet her family for seven days. Her husband and children beg Maryam to flee with them instead of returning to prison but she has not yet made her decision.

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

Toni, a young 24-year-old woman who is released from prison, finds herself having to return home to live with her mother Betty, with whom relations are strained. Determined to reconnect with her daughter Anna, whom Betty has raised in her absence, Toni gets a job in her uncle's brasserie nearby the port. But she soon finds herself mired once again in the smuggling shenanigans of her childhood sweetheart Max, who's the reason she first went to prison, and who's also Anna's father. Pulled in all directions, Toni must fight to break free from this toxic environment and to take up her place as a mother and free woman.