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Maryam DIRECTOR: Ramin Serry
USA 1:30:00 35mm Color English 
 Executive Producer: Cyrus Serry
Iranian American teenager Maryam seems identical to her suburban New Jersey friends: driving Dad's station wagon, gossiping in the school bathroom and joining her parent's neighborhood parties and their middle-class chatter of deck-building, college admissions and eyelash grooming. Her family's seemingly effortless assimilation into whitebread America becomes suddenly exposed, however, when the 1979 Iran hostage crisis breaks, causing neighbors to unveil casual ostracization maneuvers and strangers to reveal far more threatening ones. The difference between Maryam and the roller-skating racists she thinks are her friends is further heightened by the arrival of her politicized cousin from Iran. More interested in assassinating the Shah than joining her at the roller rink, Ali embodies a past and present she can barely fathom, and harbors a vision of her family history far different—and far more unsettling—than her own. Capturing the divisions between Iranian Americans and the rest of America during the turbulent hostage era, and more importantly between factions within the Iranian community itself, Ramin Serry's debut film certainly struck a chord at this year's Iranian Cinema Spotlight in Chicago. That screening triggered an almost cathartic outpouring from an audience appreciative of its reflection of their own conflicts and choices.Jason Sanders
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