Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival

 
Be Like Others
Director: Tanaz Eshaghian
Country: USA/Canada/Iran
Year: 2008
Runtime: 74 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Screening Times: Friday, February 26, 9:00 p.m. Rated 14A
 
Buy tickets from Cinematheque Ontario
 
Synopsis:
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 Life Others is a fascinating look at those on the fringes of Iranian life — those looking for acceptance through the most radical of means.  
 
Director’s Biography:
Tanaz Eshaghian was born in Iran in 1974 and emigrated to the United States shortly after the 1979 revolution.  She grew up in New York, where she continued to speak Persian at home with her mother.  In 1996, she graduated from Brown University in Semiotics.  Her first film I Call Myself Persian, completed in 2002, told the story of how Iranians living in the U.S. were affected by prejudice and xenophobia after 9/11. In Love Iranian-American Style, completed in 2006, she filmed her traditional Iranian Jewish family, both in New York and Los Angeles, documenting their obsession with marrying her off and her own cultural ambivalence. For Be Like Others, her début feature-length film, Eshaghian returned to Iran for the first time in 25 years.
 
Film Festivals:
Sundance Film Festival, USA, January 2008
Berlin Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, February 2008
Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece, March 2008
Hot Docs Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, April 2008
Inside Out Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, May 2008
Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, February 2010
 
Awards:
Teddy Jury Prize and the ELSE Siegessäule Reader’s Choice Award, Berlin Film Festival
FIPRESCI Prize, Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival
Entertainment Partners Canada Award, Inside Out Film Festival
 
Media Coverage:
BBC News: Iran’s ‘diagnosed transsexuals’
Cinematical: Be Like Others – Film Review
Movieline: Director Tanaz Eshaghian On Her Gay Iranian Transsexual Doc
New York Magazine: ‘Be Like Others’ Director Tanaz Eshaghian on Sundance, Sex Changes, and the Ayatollah
The Reeler: Tanaz Eshaghian, Be Like Others
Screen Daily: Be Like Others – Film Review
Variety: Be Like Others – Film Review
 
Official Film Website:
Be Like Others
 
Overview by Julie Giles