LA Weekly

Yes, I saw one worth seeing: Persepolis, the animated feature film that combines Marjane Satrapi's graphic-novel-style memoirs Persepolis:The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis II: The Story of a Return. The movie tells the coming of age of the precocious Satrapi during the tremendous upheaval in Iran around the time of the fall of the Shah, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni and Islamic fundamentalism. It follows her exile in Austria as a teenager and then her brief return to Iran after the Iran-Iraq War.

While Satrapi's personal coming-of-age story is recognizable to anyone who's lived to see 3O -- search for identity, love, loss, reinvention, declaration of self, etc. -- the backdrop against which these rites of passage are set is more exotic and terrifying. The combination of universal adolescent concerns in a time and place of tremendous upheaval and loss makes Persepolis a primer for anyone interested in getting a more up-close-and-personal view of the heartbreaking rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Or, indeed, of the heartbreak of fundamentalist fascism and the rule of ignorance anywhere.

Should be required viewing in vast swaths of this country.

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