What We’re Reading: Russia in the Arctic and Ghosts in Tehran

Under the Shadow Written and directed by Babak Anvari Shideh, an aspiring doctor living in Tehran at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, grabs her daughter, Dorsa, and flees her apartment building in the dead of night. Panicked and unthinking, she forgets her hijab. Unmarked police find her, arrest her and bring her to a shabby detention center, where the captain lets her off with a warning before coldly telling her, “A woman should be scared of exposing herself more than anything else.” It’s unclear whether she told the authorities why she was running, alone and immodest, in the streets of the capital. I suspect she didn’t, because they wouldn’t have believed the truth: Shideh was trying to save her daughter from a ghost, only to be turned back by the very social forces that created so much fear in the first place. “Under the Shadow” is just drenched in metaphors like these. Indeed, the ghosts in question – traditional Persian boogeymen called djinn – are said to travel on the wind, which in this film is less a meteorological event than an avatar of change. Change, after all, is at the heart of the story. Iran had just undergone […]