A WAR ON WOMEN

SYNOPSIS

Instead of framing the 2022 feminist-led "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising in Iran as a sudden revolt, A WAR ON WOMEN reveals it as the eruption of a feminist resistance more than forty years in the making. The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran's morality police captured the world's attention, but the film reveals that the history of this movement stretches back to the first protests against compulsory veiling following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Through intimate interviews, rare archival materials, and previously unseen footage shot inside Iran, the film weaves together the personal and political journeys of seven extraordinary women. Activists, mothers, actresses, former political prisoners, and exiles form an unbroken chain of resistance that has withstood imprisonment, torture, and exile across four generations.

Centering the voices of those who chose not to remain silent in the face of systemic oppression, A WAR ON WOMEN reveals how women have remained the primary target of the Islamic Republic's efforts to control public life, political participation, and bodily autonomy. Yet each generation has transformed repression into renewed resistance, passing strength, knowledge, and defiance from one to the next. Historical, personal, and urgently contemporary, the film offers an intimate and nuanced portrait of a country often misunderstood while illuminating the extraordinary courage behind one of the world's longest-running feminist movements.

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