Women on the Front Line (2013)

Women on the Front Line is a one-hour documentary exploring the battle between the women's rights movement and rigid Sharia law in modern day Iran. The expose comes from Hossein Martin Fazeli, a filmmaker with a track record of bringing Iranian cultural topics into the public eye in his work. The film uses an interview-based format, intercut with beautiful imagery of the country and abstract artistic expressions of the oppressive conditions women are forced to endure in the culture.

The film wastes no time depicting the limitations women have imposed upon them, from mundane laws dealing with the restrictive clothing women are forced to wear (their entire bodies must be covered in public, beginning around age nine) to the downright blasphemous subordination of female testimony "value" in the court system. The poignant example used to demonstrate the latter is an instance of rape; where in the case of an accused man's word against a female victim's, a woman automatically loses the case because her testimony is only "worth half" that of a man's in the eyes of the court. So, unless there is a witness (how often is that the case in a rape accusation?) corroborating the woman's testimony, rape goes unpunished in the country in the bulk of cases.