The Persians

A family confronts a past that is both keeping them together and preventing them from breaking free.

Meet the Valiat family. In Iran they were somebodies. In America they’re nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose who stayed in Tehran during the revolution. Her daughters, Shirin and Seema, left for America in 1979. She lives in a shabby apartment, paranoid and alone—except when she is visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law–breaking granddaughter who takes her debauchery with a side of purpose yet somehow manages to survive. The other granddaughter, Bita, is a self-righteous but lost law student spending her days in New York City eating pancakes and quietly giving away her belongings.

When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up being bailed out of jail by Bita, the family’s brittle status quo cracks open. Shirin embarks upon a grand but half-baked quest to restore the family name—but what does that even mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Will they ever realize that life is more than just an old story? View Less