Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival,
Persepolis is an animated featured based on the autobiographical graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi, precocious and outspoken, grew up wearing sneakers and beating up boys. When she was ten years old, her world changed overnight. Girls and boys had to use different doors to enter the school. She had to cover herself with a long dark robe. Grownups around her began to disappear. It is through her eyes that we see a people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power, forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, Marjane outsmarts the “social guardiansâ€? and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around
Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, Marjane plots her escape to a better world. Nick Schager of
Slant magazine writes “
Persepolis feels ripped straight from its creator’s heart, a sore, scathing, warts-and-all account of her formative years bolstered by its formidable aesthetic inventiveness, and elevated to the near-apex of its art form by its unguarded sincerity.â€?
