Flashback: Ten (2002) – Abbas Kiarostami’s experimental road movie gives voice to Iranian women

Although Ten unspools like a docu­mentary, it’s actually a fiction, with the characters improvising over outlines they discussed with the director before setting out on their drives.

The film features conversations between a female driver (played by Mania Akbari) and the passengers she drives around Tehran. Some of the dialogue is with her aggressive young son, Amin (Amin Maher, Akbari’s real son), who hasn’t forgiven her for divorcing his father. Other passengers include a prostitute and a friend in a troubled relationship. The outside world passes by as a montage of traffic sounds.

In his early films, Kiarostami used stories of children to make social, if not political, points, thereby circumventing Iran’s harsh censorship laws. But Ten is more direct in its social analysis, and was consequently the first of his films to be banned in the country – four of its sequences were judged unfit for public viewing. The women discuss issues such as discrimination, how they have no legal standing and how a woman can file for a divorce only when her husband has beaten her.