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A groundbreaking feature film, both in style and content. A riveting live action story is presented in a new animation style that helps illustrate how moral lines can be blurred by necessity. A young female reporter returns to Iran to care for her ailing mother, but is soon drawn into reporting on a forbidden subject - the women and girls who prostitute themselves in sham 'temporary marriages.' Arrested, imprisoned, and beaten by officials who demand that she confess to her 'sins' (of trying to tell the truth), Roxana realizes that the only way to survive is to seduce her interrogator in prison. Amir falls in love with her, and against all odds, gets her released from prison, an act that helps her escape the country at the expense of his own demise.

In the areas in which female infanticide is prevalent, in China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, there have been and currently are massive deficits of females. Male babies were valued as potential food providers and contributors to the family income while females were another mouth to feed and could only be married off at great expense to the family. In this time of desperation, reducing liabilities, such as female children, was seen as a viable survival technique. The peasants in these province, who were dependent on the land and the crops, did the only thing they could think of to survive under these conditions--they killed their female babies.

Dark Heritage Synopsis:Claudine was born in Congo going through lots of problems as a young girl. She was adopted by Chris, a physician living in Congo. As a teenager Claudine was sent to the US to study medicine in college. Now she is a young doctor living in the US struggling with several personal and professional issues. Claudine always had an interest in investigative journalism so she accepted the recommendation of an American Magazine and invitation of her step father traveling to Congo in order to write an article about Coltan mines. What happens during this trip sets Claudine free of all her childhood nightmares. A trip full of mystery and adventure teaching Claudine eye opening lessons while relocating her long lost childhood sweetheart by coincidence.

Soosan was a famous Iranian composer and singer in 1970s imprisoned in Turkey for illegal border trespassing. We get to know Soosan through her memories which she is writing on prison to reflect on her life. Soosan's Father used to be a very famous violin composer ending up home bound and forced to make a living by playing violin in streets accompanying Soosan singing popular songs. Through much up and down, Soosan ends up turning to a well known singer in Iran but fame brings much complication to her life forcing Soosan to escape her homeland. Ahmad, The Prison supervisor is reviewing Soosan's memoirs along with us pushing Ahmad to make decisions that impact Soosan's path forever.

Elahe Massumi's installation work, The Hijras examines rituals and rites of passages that are inconceivable and archaic in the contemporary world. The tales of emasculated men and their acquiring divine status is encountered throughout both fiction and non-fiction literature and it fills our imagination. However, the choice of the Hijras as the subject matter for this work goes beyond simple curiosity. More than offering commiseration, Massumi opens to her public the possibility of going beyond the purely tangible and visual. Her work invites the viewer to enter into a more extreme space, an off-planet location in contemporary art, from where no one leaves undisturbed.

Shot in New Delhi, A Kiss is not a Kiss is a four channel video installation about child prostitution in a country where it is estimated that 300 thousand children are involved in prostitution - a number that is rising by 8 to 10% per annum, according to recent reports. In cities such as Bombay, Delhi, Madras and Calcutta about 15% of the prostitutes are children and the average age of girls supplied to the brothels in the last two years has decreased from 14 and 16 years to 10 and 14 years. A girl between 10 and 12 years fetches the highest price and it is a girl of that age that appears in Elahe Massumi's most recent video. A Kiss is not a Kiss closes Massumi's trilogy (Obliteration l994 and The Hijras 2000) where the action is anchored in the worlds of patriarchal, economic, sexual and racial oppression. Like Bill Viola, Massumi travels great distances to make her work. In both cases, far-reaching locations become a source of inspiration and often furnish the subject matter of the work. Unlike Viola, who travels to experience sacred locations, Massumi treks to the frontiers of the modern world, to places of savagery and harsh daily realities of survival, directing her attention to places and subjects considered either perilous or undesirable.

Obliteration, a multimedia installation by the Iranian born artist Elahe Massumi, uses the practice of female circumcision to explore the difficulties which women still face in this supposedly enlightened era. Routinely carried out throughout Africa and in parts of Middle East, female circumcision involves the removal of the clitoris and sometimes-other portions of the female genitalia from young girls and young women. The painful procedure, which is frequently performed without benefit of anesthesia, is deemed necessary to ensure that the young women will be marriageable.