The world gets another opportunity to see how women are treated in a strict Moslem country in Hemlock (Shokaran), directed by Behrooz Afkhami. The country is Iran. Women had some freedoms before the revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah rule began, so the film is yet another example of the recent pressure for liberalization. Afkhami, in fact, has been elected to the parliament. The story is rather simple. Mahmoud Bassirat (played by Fariborz Arab-Nia) is a wealthy business executive who becomes the CEO when his boss relinquishes control after being hospitalized due to a mysterious accident. During visits to his boss at the hospital, Bassirat meets a nurse, Miss Riahi (played by Hedieh Tehrani), and the two have an affair. She lives with her father and is eager for marriage. Bassirat ultimately decides to end the affair, but she is pregnant and wants to be a mother. Miss Riahi then presses Bassirat to divorce and marry her, but he does not want a scandal. Bassirat repeatedly tries to get her to stop contacting him, offering to pay the fine if she will obtain an abortion, but she persists. Bassirat then visits her father at home, thus implying that an affair has been going on. When the Miss Riahi returns home, her father refuses to allow her to enter the home, as he wants no part of the scandal. Homeless, she buys a liter of gas, goes to Bassirat’s home to place the gas container in his room, and then drives onto the highway so that she will be involved in a fatal accident. Bassirat, who has taken his wife to dinner to celebrate becoming CEO, stops on the road to look at the accident and learns that his erstwhile lover is the victim. Clearly, Afkhami is asking fellow Iranians to be more humane in treating women, a theme also stressed in the Iranian film The Girl in the Sneakers (2000). MH