One of the more interesting films in this year’s “Celebration of Iranian Cinema” at the UCLA Hammer in Westwood is Farnoosh Samadi’s Between Dreams and Hope (2025). The American public probably knows very little about the situation of trans persons in Iran but this film provides a window into that aspect of Iranian life. Beginning with Nega Azarbayjani’s Facing Mirrors (2011), several Iranian films over the years have focused on transgender themes. These have explored the complex realities of being trans in Iran, where gender-affirming surgery is legally permitted but highly regulated. Meanwhile, other LGBTQ+ identities remain strictly criminalized. These movies on transexual topics often highlight the societal pressures, family dynamics, and legal hurdles trans individuals face.
The legal hurdles that confront trans individuals in Iran have to do with several qualifying factors proscribed in law. The trans person must meet the criteria for sexual reassignment surgery based on physical appearance and acceptable social norms, but also (with the exception of orphans and those over a certain age (perhaps 40), parental consent in required. This is the issue that the main character Azad (played by Fereshten Hosseini) experiences in Between Dreams and Hope. Azad is planning to transition from being female to male. Azad lives with a female partner named Nora (Sadaf Asgari) and they have been a couple together for about two years after they met at the university in Tehran. Azad had done all the initial paperwork to qualify for sex reassignment surgery with the gender surgery specialists but needs his father to sign off.
Azad’s mother died some years before and the widowed father (Reza Amouzad) still lives and works his small farm with milk cows in a village over the Alborz Mountains near the Caspian Sea. Azad has been estranged from that father for a number of years and has only bad memories of past confrontations with their father, the older brother, and a very young brother born before the mother’s death. The film revolves around Azad’s decision to return to the remote village to confront the man – in hopes of getting his signature on the required document.
Iran is the only Islamic country where the sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is recognized. Many European citizens travel to this Middle East country for gender confirmation and reassignment surgery. The Guardian wrote “Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change.” Hence, Iran can be called the hell of homosexuals and the paradise of Trans seeking SRS. Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, once in 1964 in his book Tahrir al-Wasila and once after the Islamic Revolution in 1982, issued a fatwa on the act of reassignment and confirmation gender only for people whose faces are inconsistent with their gender and considered it legitimate and this issue became one of the emerging issues of Shia Islamic jurisprudence. According to the jurists, since it is not possible to change the soul, but at the same time medical advances have made it possible to change the body, the act of gender reassignment is permissible. The film does not linger on the details of Azad’s plan for sexual reassignment surgery – but more of the bureaucratic aspects of the process in contemporary Iran. We get a clear distinction between the comforts of youth culture in Tehran versus the difficulties of acceptance in rural Iran.
After an ominous dream sequence about a pregnant woman in a white wedding gown at the start of the film, the story settles onto the daily life of a queer couple in Tehran. Azad (Fereshteh Hosseini), a trans man, lives with his partner Nora (Sadaf Asgari). Their world is small but filled with care: a modest apartment and a relationship rooted in tenderness and trust.. Azad and Nora seem comfortable with their relationship. We see them sleeping together and enjoying domestic life. Azad has been busy with moving toward with the paperwork for a sexual reassignment surgery in order to live openly as a trans male and hopefully marry Nora. That fragile calm is shaken when Azad learns he must return to his hometown to get a signature from his estranged father – who rejected him years ago – to complete his medical transition
We get an early taste of what Azad is up against, even in Tehran. On his way into a clinic for gender-affirming care, he’s stopped by a security guard who demands he wear a hijab. The request erases his masculinity and reduces him to a state-sanctioned view that he is still a woman. This may seem a bit surreal but is typical of what trans people have to endure. The only issue for the viewer is that the actor Fereshten Hosseini playing Azad comes across as too passive and saccharine.
Azad must choose between indefinite delay in Tehran, where his transition stalls under mounting legal obstacles, or a possibly dangerous return to his rural hometown, where he’ll have to face the man who cast him out. The choice extends beyond personal trauma – it mirrors the impossible decisions queer people are forced into, stuck between competing forms of risk and compromise. The set-up seems forced and not exactly original. Too much time is spent on close-ups of Azad and Nora, without revealing much about their inner selves.
Suddenly, there is birthday party for Azad and a group of well-meaning friends emerge to help celebration the birthday. I am not sure how or why this party of university-age young “queer” people end up taking magic mushrooms or why this provides a drug-like surreal haze over the scenario, but apparently such things go on in Tehran. Here we see the Iranian love of poetry recitation and also learn that Nora and Azaz were in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the university and recall the lines which they re-enact in a marriage proposal. Azad wanders off, apparently high on some drug, to recall a vision of a three-eyed calf that her mother raised: A visual metaphor of difference and acceptance.
At any rate, after this part, Azad feels empowered to go ahead with a plan to visit his family village and try to get his father’s signature on the required authorization forms. Now the plot moves into the territory of a thriller. After the long drive over the mountains, they Azad and Nora arrive at the village and there they first meet Azad’s 8-year-old little brother, who figures in the story later. When Azad’s gruff father and older brother arrive, there Is no acceptance of Azad’s gender shift – only shame and blame, anger and disappointment. Azad and Nora are pushed out of the house and forced to return to Nora’s car. Quite shaken, Azad realizes that he is missing his cell phone. Since it was probably left in his father’s house by mistake, Azad decides to walk back to the house. Nora waits patiently in her car and, after many hours pass, begins to think that something bad has happened to Azad.
At this point, the plot is not surprising. Being a bit of a thriller, we shift our attention to Nora, whose role is well developed by actress Sadaf Asgari. Without providing a spoiler alert, there is some suspense in the plot development. Obviously, the film addresses the ponderous impact of the patriarchal nature of rural Iranian society. In the film’s final scenes, we get to see the emergence of a resistance to the patriarchal view and left to wonder if it is possible to escape the constraints of a repressive society and make choices based on one’s own sense of identity.
This is an appropriate area of discussion given the anti-trans rhetoric in the politics of the United States at the present time. It is interesting that, within the constraints of Iran’s general intolerance of gay and lesbian self-identification that a certain range of transsexual individuals can have affirmation in Iranian society today. Between Dreams and Hope is not a perfect film but it is important in its questioning of patriarchal assumptions not only in Iran but in general. If being oppressed by society, should one just give in and give up, or should an individual take action and try to make a difference? In this film, we see that “hope” is stronger than forbearance or despair.
