A striking number of the films coming out of Iran are preoccupied with women as the bearers of cultural signification. I was surprised by this common theme that emerged from the seventeen films I viewed at the 2016 Fajr Film Festival in Tehran. In contrast to the Western gaze that looks to Iranian women to explain the oppressive Islamic system, these films cast women as signifiers of the modernization and feminization of society. Even when the films were reactionary, their depictions of girls’ and women’s subjectivity and agency challenged the traditional patriarchy. The films reflected how, despite legal and social limitations, women are more involved in the public and private sectors than ever before in Iran. More women than men attend college, and in cinema more women than ever are protagonists and directors.Established in 1982, the Fajr Film Festival is unique in many ways. A couple of years ago the festival organizers removed foreign films—which are now part of an international festival—making the Fajr Film Festival solely a showcase of Iranian films. During the 2016 festival about fifty films were shown in twenty-three theaters in Tehran. The festival, which offers a preview of what will be released later in the year, is very popular. In 2016 Iranians purchased more than half a million tickets to the festival, and an additional ninety screenings were necessary to accommodate the crowds, including screenings that began at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Iranians eagerly stand in the long lines and attend screenings at inconvenient times not only because they enjoy the festive atmosphere but also because they want to see films that they anticipate may be banned or further censored before their official release.Most of the offerings were sociopsychological melodramas, often B movies inspired by the recent works of Asghar Farhadi. My intention in this review essay is not to highlight the best films but to consider what a sample of nine films expresses regarding cultural ideology, women’s agency, and masculine anxiety in modern Iran. These films were all vying for the Crystal Simorgh for Best Film award, which Saeed Roustayi won as the director of Life and a Day. Though women played major roles in most of the films, only two of the twenty-five candidates competing for the Simorgh were made by women.A few of the films included the familiar character of the runaway girl. This girl is usually trying to escape an oppressive condition, such as an overbearing father (as in Reza Mirkarimi’s Daughter) or crippling poverty (as in Farzad Motamen’s Last Time When You Saw Sahar?). She may also be running away for love (as in Parviz Shahbazi’s Malaria). Regardless of the specific circumstances, the girl’s escape enacts the modern individual’s rejection of rigid ties to family and community. In Iran the daughter is generally expected to stay at home until she gets married, regardless of her age or employment status. She also needs the approval of her father to get married. Running away becomes an act of self-determination that exposes the lack of rights in a patriarchal society. The perceived dishonor elicits a strong response from the men in her family. But even in the worst-case scenario, when a male relative murders her, his action is seen as a misguided and desperate response. For example, Last Time When questions the accusations and judgments that lead to such a terrible act. The runaway-girl films give us two consequences for the girl’s actions: either she tragically dies, or she returns home and the family must acquiesce to some of her wishes.Hossein Farahbakhsh’s Lollipop offers an unusually harsh illustration. The young Maral is pregnant from an affair with Farhad, the older husband of her cousin Maryam. Farhad appears sensible and successful but with a darker side alluded to by the negative stereotypes the film associates with his modern Western behavior. Maral runs away to avoid exposure and a violent response from her overbearing, tough-guy brother, Morteza. She believes that Farhad will leave the country with her or at least help her escape. But Farhad has already begun a new affair and, in response to Maral’s demands, beats her to death and throws her body to his foreign-named dogs. The tragedy presents a lesson by showing the dangers of these types of transgressions. In the end, instead of turning Farhad in to the police, Maral’s mother, brother, and Maryam murder him for contaminating the sanctity of their family.Daughter presents the second resolution. Setarah, a college graduate living in Abadan with her family, takes a flight to Tehran to attend her friend’s goodbye party against her stern father’s wishes. She wants to make her own decision, but her father, Ahmad, thinks it inconceivable for his daughter to go alone. He is an honest, hardworking man who has been unable to talk to his daughter since she started high school. Setarah’s plans go awry when the returning flight is delayed and her furious father drives to Tehran to pick her up. Exasperated, he slaps her during the drive back, but this violent reaction ends in a kind of reconciliation. Setarah escapes to her Aunt Farzaneh’s home, forcing Ahmad to confront his estranged sister, whom he has not seen since her marriage to a man he did not approve of. A parallel is drawn between Setarah and Farzaneh that offers important lessons for the three protagonists. Farzaneh is now in debt and getting a divorce. She is angry with Ahmad for disowning her but eventually comes to terms with him. Setarah reaffirms the love and value of her father, who must learn to listen and forgive. The father realizes the consequences of his past actions, as suggested in the final scene, when Ahmad cries while fixing Farzaneh’s stove pipe.There are other important differences between Setarah in Daughter and Maral in Lollipop. While Setarah and her girlfriends engage in harmless activities, such as joyriding and hanging out in coffeehouses, Maral and her friends hang out with boys, smoke pot, and drink. One girl is innocent and redeemable; the other is not. Setarah wants to return home; Maral cannot.Other common tropes in these films are the missing father and the fear of losing one’s home, both of which I think symbolize nostalgia for the lost patriarchy and idealized family. In Lollipop, for example, the father has died, and the family has financial problems. Morteza, the brother, is young, truculent, and immature. He does not even recognize that the car he drives was secured by Maral through her affair with Farhad. In Daughter Farzaneh compares Ahmad’s salutary behavior toward his daughter, ultimately standing by her, with the way he exiled Farzaneh in his role as the family patriarch. Farzaneh believes that their late father would not have abandoned her even if she had made a mistake.Family is the primary source of identity in these films, yet it is persistently under attack and running the risk of breakdown. The sanctity of the family must be preserved, even if it means learning to accept changes or difficult conditions. Family members must not only listen to each other but be on guard against dangerous intruders. The mother in Lollipop says: “My daughter is afraid of coming home. Tell her the door of this home is always open to her. Tell her home is safer than outside.” In Daughter Farzaneh reconfirms the primacy of her natal family and says that no one can replace the family. The question remains: to what degree should this all-important family structure stay under traditional patriarchal authority? Family is an allegory and a model for the imagined community and nation in these films, although it is also a nation that many girls want to leave. Both Maral in Lollipop and Sahar in Last Time When try to flee, but their journeys end in disaster. The message is clear: do not be fooled by easy solutions and Western temptations. In Roustayi’s Life and a Day, Somayeh returns to her dysfunctional family instead of leaving with her rich Afghan suitor. (During the discussion after the screening at the Charsou Cineplex, this “positive” ending was mentioned as a suggestion by the Ministry of Culture.) Somayeh stays for her intelligent young brother, who represents the future of the country.In many of these films, once the girl is grown and married, the site of patriarchal power is transferred from the father to the husband, who feels threatened by his wife’s independence. Her freedom—such as her ability to work and have her own income—leads to jealousy and fear of adultery, making the marital relationship vulnerable. However, a jealous man is considered weak and thus often resorts to physical violence to prove his masculinity and regain control, as illustrated in Reza Dormishian’s ambitious Lantouri. Dormishian uses interviews with characters offering opposing perspectives to examine recent acid attacks on women in Iran. The film was inspired by the tragic experience of Ameneh Bahrami, blinded in both eyes after a 2004 attack by a rejected suitor. At first Bahrami appeals to sharia law—which allows eye-for-an-eye retribution—asking for the perpetrator to be blinded. She then forgives him at the last minute. The words of Pasha, the jealous criminal in the film, echo those of Bahrami’s actual attacker: “If I can’t have you, no one can.” Dormishian’s film argues for the woman’s forgiveness as an antidote to jealousy and possession.Jealousy and suspicion are complex and ambiguous affects. The festival showed films where wives were portrayed as justified in their suspicion of husbands, as in Houman Seyyedi’s Sound and Fury. Similarly, in Hatef Alimardani’s Seven Months, Rana’s suspicions are interpreted as the possessive neurosis of an antisocial, pregnant wife. But in the end she is correct, while her husband’s suspicions of her are disproved. Ebrahim Ebrahimian’s Inadaptable twists the formula when the husband of Mahtab’s best friend, who had warned Mahtab about her husband’s infidelity, is actually the unfaithful spouse. While men’s jealousy leads to tragic consequences, jealousy can be empowering for women. For men in these films, jealousy is tied to possessiveness and authority, but it gives women the right to demand and respond to a sense of loss and wrongdoing. Such women characters do not need to accept their lot or to have their male relatives defend their rights and honor, nor are they the self-sacrificing women of earlier classic films, like Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila (1996).In these new films women are the primary protectors of the sanctity of marriage and home. They make sure that husbands do not transgress. Their sense of betrayal when their husbands do so reinforces the nuclear family. Many viewers may understandably see such women characters as reactionary and conservative. But the films also privilege the women’s desires over the men’s, even though men have more legal rights and can take a second or temporary wife. In Seven Months Rana is presented as a traditional rural girl in contrast to her stereotypically modern and “loose” sister-in-law. Yet Rana’s demand that her husband be faithful to her indicates her modern understanding of women’s rights in marriage. In these films the women embody cultural discourse and the contradictory condition of desiring modernity while remaining in line with traditions.The film noir Sound and Fury focuses on the other woman in an adulterous marriage. Like Lantouri, Sound and Fury is based on a real story. It recalls the controversial case of Shahla Jahed, the mistress of a famous football player who was hanged for killing his wife in 2002. In flashbacks of the same scenes told from the different perspectives of the adulterous Kosrow and his mistress, Hana, we are introduced to two Hanas: the manipulative femme fatale and the innocent self-sacrificing victim. The film makes us question the quick judgments and binary structure that puts a woman in one category or the other. Unfortunately, Sound and Fury, like many Iranian films, reinforces the traditional stereotype of a dependent, self-sacrificing woman and a controlling, status-conscious, and vengeful man. Kosrow finds his value in his possessions and reputation, while Hana identifies herself through her emotional and physical dependence on Kosrow. While Maryam in Lantouri forgives her attacker, Kosrow calls Hana the devil, blames her for the death of his wife, and asks for her to be put to death.Overall, these festival films convey how Iranian daughters, wives, and lovers are contentious sites for the society’s discourse on modernity. Only by accepting the newly empowered woman can Iran embrace twenty-first-century configurations of family and society.