Free Political Film Screenings Cinema Politica is a project organized by Montréal-based non-profit überculture, and comprises a network of several local film exhibition series across Canada, Europe and the USA.

Be Like Others

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Concordia University (Montreal)
Monday October 19, 2009
Screening begins 19h30
Venue: Room H-110, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Concordia

Be Like Others will be preceded by a short film and will be followed by a guest speaker.
Be Like Others is presented as part of Cinema Politica's "Sex, Labour, Smut Film and Video Festival."

Be Like Others

A provocative look at young Iranian men choosing to under go sex change surgery

Tanaz Eshaghian / USA-Canada-Iran / 2008 / 74 min / Persian with English subtitles

An intimate and unflinching look at life in Iran, seen through the lens of those living at its fringes, BE LIKE OTHERS is a provocative look at a generation of young men choosing to undergo sex change surgery.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country with strict social mores and traditional values, sex-change operations are legal. Over twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious edict) making sex change permissible for "diagnosed transsexuals." Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death. With Iran's international arms negotiations dominating news headlines worldwide, a very private kind of drama is unfolding behind the scenes.

Highly feminine and attracted to members of the same sex, yet forced to live in secret for fear of retribution, a generation of young Iranian men are adopting an identity legally allowed to them—transsexual. In pursuit of what one man calls simply, "a decent life," they flock to the country's best-established gender reassignment surgeon, Dr. Bahram Mir Jalali, and are counseled by 24-year-old Vida, a post-op woman who claims to be "reborn" but warns of dangers that still await. Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian accompanies several young men as they contemplate and prepare for their transformation, then follows them into and out of surgery.

Intimate and unflinching, BE LIKE OTHERS is a fascinating look at those on the fringes of Iranian life—those looking for acceptance through the most radical of means.