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The stunning Women Without Men, a film by contemporary artist Shirin Neshat, was first screened in 2009 at LACMA.

Women Without Men describes the lives and fates of four women who belong to different social classes: a prostitute, an upper-class married woman, an activist, and a devout woman whose only dream is to get married and have children. All four live an exiled life in their own country, where they struggle for an identity in 1950's deeply patriarchal Iran. It was an era in which growing up female meant deference to authority and power, and being trapped in limited gender roles. These women form their own utopia in a garden, where they try to reconstruct their lives. 

 

The women's overriding desire for justice, freedom, and independence is set against the backdrop of the nation's need for an ideological and sociopolitical shift during the 1953 coup d'état. "The 1953 coup also shows how the people of Iran looked for freedom. Iran has a dark history of being ruled by dictators or being ruled by foreign imperialists," Neshat said, "and the 1953 demonstrations were pivotal in our history where the people of Iran wanted to take the fate of their nation into their own hands."

One cannot help but be transfixed by the austere beauty of the images and the intensity and emotionality of the characters. It is in these gripping scenes that we see history repeating itself, and that art and the artist, a nation and its people, are inexplicably linked through their longing for what is absent -- the opportunity to construct one's identity and actually create an imagined community.