“…funny, provocative, moving… especially Ackert, who fully embodies a range of characters.” [more] – BACKSTAGE WEST           “Ackert is just as good in a heavier, more difficult part... he creates one of the film's many humorous moments. Then he moves under his character's front to unearth Ali's anger and explore the sources of it.” [more] – COLUMBUSLIVE.COM           “...played by David Ackert with a fascinating combination of brooding intensity and kindhearted vulnerability” [more] – NATIONAL REVIEW           “Parris and Ackert strike its deepest notes in exploring Ali and Maryam’s growing relationship...” [more] – THE VILLAGE VOICE           “superb” [more] – THE NEW TIMES           “...sensitive performance” – VARIETY            “well-acted... wonderful performances” [more] – ENTERTAINMENT TODAY            “complex, sharply defined portrayal...” [more] – ENTERTAINMENT TODAY         “The Ass” by Jennie Webb BACKSTAGE WEST     If one of the goals of the Edge of the World Theater Festival is to expand our safe sensibilities and all-American artistic boundaries, then the English-language premier of this satire by Iranian playwright Parvis Sayyad is right on the money. After the Iranian revolution, a wife (Mary Apick) is questioning everything around her as regimes change and bullets fly. Her husband (David Ackert) is getting on her nerves. After years of marriage he’s somehow not the man he was, and he is about to take a gratuitous job with the new government. One morning it’s all too much: she looks at her husband, and he has literally turned into an ass-from the neck up at least. So what’s a woman in a male-dominated country such as Iran to do? Seek advice from all the other men in her life, of course (also played by Ackert). Not that The Ass is breaking new theatrical ground, particularly. And in its very traditional structure, the play is far from experimental. With references to Ionesco, Kafka, and Shakespeare, diving into politics, religion, and social issues, the play can get quite heady. But sharply and intelligently directed by John Kellam, with quality production values and knock-out performances from Apick and especially Ackert – who fully embodies a range of characters – this two hander is funny, provocative, moving, and just the sort of thing that should be making its way to our edge of the world     [back to top]           “Distant cousin” “A foreign culture home comes home with gravity and laughter in Maryam” by Melissa Starker COLUMBUSLIVE.COM     There’s nothing like a good piece of music to get you in the mood. In the opening credits for Maryam, news footage of Jimmy Carter, the Shah of Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini is choreographed to the Cars’ Let the Good Times Roll. With sound and imagery, writer/director Ramin Serry evokes an era and establishes the sure-handed balance of his endearing debut feature. It’s at once politically relevant and light and funny. Plus, it’s not as if anyone who was of a certain age in 1979 can resist those guitar licks.     Mary (Mariam Parris) is in high school at the time. She’s Iranian born (her full name is Maryam) but U.S. bred, eager to fit in among the blondes in her New Jersey school, though her father’s restrictions on make-up and dating make it difficult. When her cousin, Ali (David Ackert), arrives from Iran to attend college, Mary gets a quick lesson in the new ways of her birth country. He’s forbidden as a devout Muslim from shaking her hand at the airport.     As she introduces him to American pizza and sarcasm, he tries to explain the rationale behind women wearing the chador back home and why he fought to depose the Shah. Mary doesn’t fully realize that by bringing Ali into the social scene via roller rinks and a family friend who’s a notorious skirt-chaser, she’s immersing him in much of what he actively sought to eradicate at home and setting him up for trouble.     Serry chose his milieu wisely for establishing empathy with the foreigner; high school and early college contain certain aspects of our culture at their worst and most concentrated. America wouldn’t look its best to anyone stuck in the Jersey suburbs in the late ’70s.     The differences between Ali and his cousin mean little once American hostages are taken in Iran. As yellow ribbons are tied to trees around the community, a wave of racism affects the family’s neighbors and former friends. It fuels the pre-existing tension in their home, there from Ali’s belief that Mary’s father had something to do with the death of Ali’s father and the close proximity of the young man’s other enemy, the Shah, holed up in a New York hospital.     Serry counters Ali’s dark emotions with injections of humor from down-to-earth dialogue and the sunny, saturated tones within Harlan Bosmajian’s cinematography (best known for the after-school-special-with-a-hangover look of Comedy Central’s Strangers With Candy). Parris is the film’s lynchpin, however. Her Mary is a vibrant, terrific smart-ass, inspiring comparison to the best leading performances in the best teen comedies of the past two decades.     Ackert is just as good in a heavier, more difficult part. With the look on his face as Ali is introduced to roller disco, he creates one of the film’s many humorous moments. Then he moves under his character’s front to unearth Ali’s anger and explore the sources of it.     Together, actor and filmmaker illustrate a basic truth that makes this period piece timely and extraordinarily relevant today: Behind most conceived acts of political or religious extremism are individual, personal stories of pain and loss. The only way to stop the seemingly senseless is to try to understand what sense—of rage, of frustration, of hopelessness—there is behind it.     [back to top]           “Mixed-Up Kids” By Michael Potemra NATIONAL REVIEW     The movie Maryam explores familiar territory — what it's like to be an American high-school girl dealing with the demands of popularity in general and dating in particular, and the often less-than-reasonable demands made by parents. But it tackles this universal predicament in a very crisply drawn particular situation: It's 1979, the U.S. and Iran are at daggers drawn — and our young heroine is an Iranian-American.     Maryam is a winsome youth, well incarnated by the sweet Mariam Parris, and it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is the epitome of assimilation, rebelling modestly against the strictures of her parents. Her cousin Ali, a fanatical supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini, comes to the U.S. to study — and disapproves of Maryam's American easygoingness even more than her parents do. Ali is played by David Ackert with a fascinating combination of brooding intensity and kindhearted vulnerability — far from the stereotype of the religious fanatic one finds in lesser movies.     Maryam's coming-of-age story is also an analogy for America and the meaning of assimilation. In the process of growing up — just as in the process of becoming American — earlier authorities must be overthrown, and a new sense of self established; but the highest values and insights of the earlier authorities will remain, interiorized in the mature person. Maryam will grow up to be a bourgeois individualist and thorough suburbanite; but she will not despise her roots, nor her family members who still abide by the earlier codes.     The atmosphere of the late 1970s, too, is convincingly recreated — just one of the many pleasures of this fine, insightful drama.     [back to top]           “Maryam” reviewed by Brent Simon ENTERTAINMENT TODAY     A well-acted, economical and intelligent vivisection of cultural identity, casual prejudice and racial backlash, Maryam takes place in 1979 and unfolds through the eyes of the 16-year-old title character (Mariam Parris), who prefers to be called Mary. Her physician father (Shaun Toub) and housewife mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) are respected members of their suburban New Jersey community, and while Mary feels their rules on dating and make-up are too strict, the trio lead what by all accounts appears to be a happy domestic existence; we feel the ebb and flow of typical parent-child frustrations and exasperation that are born of healthy, loving relationships.     Mary’s Americanized serenity, however, is soon disrupted by two separate events — the arrival of her cousin Ali (David Ackert) from Iran and the taking of American hostages from the United States embassy in Tehran. While obviously not involved with or in support of the plots, Mary and her parents—like many current Arab Americans in the aftermath of Sept. 11—soon find themselves on the receiving end of chilly glances, barbed remarks and cancelled party invitations.     Ali, ostensibly in the country to get his masters degree in physics, doesn’t help matters. A devoted and observant practitioner of Islam who identifies with the strongly anti-American rhetoric of the on-the-rise Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali courses with a religious fervor that’s intriguing to Mary, a secular Muslim. And yet there’s also a deeper, darker and more personal secret that rips at the fabric of Ali’s relationship with Mary’s father. Played out against the backdrop of the hostage crisis (effectively captured using actual period news footage), will the secret rip Mary’s family apart or finally draw them closer together?     Writer-director Ramin Serry’s film mainly succeeds because of the wonderful performances he draws from his cast. Toub isn’t just a typical one-note “immigrant father;” you see his the weight of his concerns, even when he lashes out in an effort to blindly control situations. Parris in particular shines, exhibiting all the self-effacing charm and natural charisma of a young (think pre-Speed, even) Sandra Bullock. It also helps considerably that—both as written and as performed—Mary is a character who isn’t weighed down by one sort of broad-stroke “master emotion.” We see Mary in moments of confidence and uncertainty, power and weakness, and this balance legitimizes her struggles. A dramatic sequence toward the film’s finale calls attention to itself with awkward staging and questionable resolution, but otherwise Serry’s film is a model of restraint. This isn’t merely one of those “budget finds” — Maryam’s storytelling is solid and thought-provoking. Film fans would do well to search it out.     [back to top]           When Politics Upend Family Life 'Maryam' focuses on an Iranian American family hit by backlash against the embassy crisis in 1979. It proves to be a timely tale.     March 8, 2002 By KEVIN THOMAS, Times Staff Writer     At the outset of the absorbing and pertinent "Maryam," the Armins of suburban New Jersey seem a typical affluent American family, to themselves and to their neighbors. That Dr. Armin (Shaun Toub), while loving and good-humored, is stricter than other fathers is the only apparent trace of his Iranian heritage. His daughter, Mary (Mariam Parris), born in Iran as Maryam and brought to the U.S. as an infant, is a beautiful, easygoing high school student, not quite ready to chafe at her father's restrictions. She feels no connection to her homeland and has no interest in it either.     All that is about to change, drastically, for the year is 1979. In the wake of the Islamic revolution, the deposed shah of Iran has ended up in a Manhattan hospital for treatment of his terminal cancer--and Armin's nephew Ali (David Ackert) has arrived to stay while pursuing a college major in physics. Right away, Mary is unsettled by the arrival of her cousin, a Muslim fundamentalist who shrinks in horror at her attempt to embrace him in welcome.     Although Ali is fluent in English, he is a stiff, formal man in the throes of cultural shock. He also carries considerable emotional baggage because of a family incident in the past, but Armin, as his sole relative, has extended him traditional Persian hospitality.     The tension Ali's presence creates in the harmonious Armin household is soon intensified beyond the family's imagining, as Iranian students storm the U.S. Embassy in Iran, taking prisoners in protest of the shah's presence in the U.S.     The prolonged international incident fans Ali's hatred of the shah while the Armins become targeted for ugly anti-Iranian acts, the same sort of mindless treatment accorded to countless Americans in the wake of Sept. 11.     At school, Mary, who previously had never been made to feel different from her classmates, is shunned and derided. The worsening situation in turn fuels Mary's desire to assert her independence and to get the full story about why Ali holds such resentment toward her father.      Iranian American filmmaker Ramin Serry, in an assured feature writing and directing debut, has woven his film from actual experiences of his family and its circle of friends, which gives "Maryam" its strong sense of having been created from within.      What shines through their ordeal is the Armins' strong, sustaining sense of family, exemplified by Mary's lovely and wise mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a woman with a mind of her own but also a shrewd and subtle mediator. Aghdashloo, a distinguished stage actress, recalls Melina Mercouri in her sultry looks, husky voice and radiant presence.      Serry proves as adept at directing actors as he is at writing for them.     Parris, Ackert and Toub give complex, sharply defined portrayals, with Maziyar Jobrani providing some light relief as a happy-go-lucky family friend and Victor Jory proving effective as Mary's would-be boyfriend, a nice kid overwhelmed by all that's happening to Mary and her family.     "Maryam" is carefully crafted, notably in its deft dramatic structuring, and has become timely in a way its maker could never have anticipated.     [back to top]           "Maryam" BY ROBERT WILONSKY The New Times     Maryam Armin (Mariam Parris), a beautiful 16-year-old Iranian-born transplant so out of touch with her roots she prefers to be called Mary, has goo-goo eyes for a dim-bulb blond boy and dreams of becoming a newscaster -- Jessica Savitch, actually. It's November 1979, and Mary's cousin, college student Ali (David Ackert), has come from Iran to stay with Mary's family in suburban New Jersey, bringing with him an anti-Shah, pro-Ayatollah Khomeini sentiment -- which renders the entire Armin household pariahs among flag-waving Americans who, after hostages are taken at the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the shah moves to New York for medical care, demand the bombing of Iran. The Armins are torn (and torn apart) by their own neighbors' newfound racism, Ali's devotion to Islam and the ayatollah and Dr. Armin's long-buried secret that involves the death of his own brother when the whole family lived in Iran. It's a shame this movie's been sitting without distribution for two years, and it would be no less a tragedy if it were viewed solely through post-September 11 eyes; it's a wise and powerful tale of race and culture forcefully told, with superb performances throughout. Parris, especially, is astonishing: the wise and weary adolescent caught between cultures without ever playing the role of mawkish casualty.     [back to top]           Cousin/Cousine by Leslie Camhi THE VILLAGE VOICE     Cousins can exert a strange fascination—a peer group more exotic than siblings, they’re a remote mirror for one’s own experience. Maryam is a story of cousinly love set against the backdrop of political insurgency. Ramin Serry’s sensitive and moving debut feature opens with archival footage of the shah of Iran, looking sleek and composed beside President Carter, and the revolutionary masses in Tehran, burning Uncle Sam in effigy.     “What did Iran have to do with me?” a girl named Maryam (Mariam Parris), asks in voice-over. She left the country as a baby with her parents, now comfortably assimilated immigrants living in safe, suburban New Jersey; her high school chums even call her “Mary.” But one day in 1979, her cousin, Ali (David Ackert), arrives from Tehran to stay with them while studying at the local university. As tensions between the U.S. and Iran mount, his fervent devotion to Islam and the Ayatollah Khomeini mix uneasily (and sometimes comically) with her own attempts to keep up a facade of carefree American teenagerdom.     Director Serry, an Iranian American who grew up in this country, said he made this intensely personal film in part to counter the general amnesia that has settled over the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, a key event in American political and social life. It was a time of yellow ribbons, flag waving, and racial epithets hurled at dark-skinned people, an incendiary tangle of patriotism and warmongering. Sound familiar? Serry perfectly captures the peculiar climate, creating uncanny echoes with today’s situation. Persian stars Shaun Toub and Shohreh Aghdashloo are extremely convincing as Maryam’s parents, a couple caught between old-world elegance and the bliss of suburban forgetfulness.     Maryam’s schoolmates are mostly blond-and-blue-eyed caricatures—glib, breezy, and nasty—and the film’s final plot twists strain credibility. Parris and Ackert strike its deepest notes in exploring Ali and Maryam’s growing relationship: Separated by vast distances of geography, language, and culture, they’re bound by the half-truths and permanent misunderstandings that lie at the heart of family.     [back to top]           “Maryam” Feb. 27, 2002 By Andrew O’Hehir salon.com     Sometimes an artist’s private obsessions pull him or her onto the cusp of history entirely by accident. Such is the case with Ramin Serry’s “Maryam,” a marvelous little indie film set in New Jersey suburbia, circa 1979, that has been kicking around the edges of the industry for two years and is only now, as a tiny side effect of Sept. 11, getting a chance with audiences. (Thanks in large part to critic Roger Ebert, who has tirelessly championed the film.) It’s now playing at the Angelika Film Center in New York, and with any luck bookings in other cities, and a decent home-video release, will follow.     There are a million little ironies in and surrounding this movie; the subject of “Maryam,” at least in part, is the fact that Americans tend to ignore the outside world until it shoves itself suddenly and unpleasantly in their faces. When Maryam Armin (Mariam Parris), a sweet, bright, perennially perplexed teenager who goes by “Mary” at her suburban high school, suggests to her television broadcasting class that her cousin who just arrived from Iran might make an interesting story, the kids around her snort. “Who cares about that?” asks one blond girl. “I mean, excuse me, but what does that have to do with school?” So the student broadcasters focus on “the homecoming controversy” instead.     Don’t misinterpret this scene; writer-director Serry -- a Chicago-area native whose parents immigrated from Iran -- isn’t out to excoriate Americans for their self-centered attitudes and cultural blind spots, or at least not Americans alone. His vision is broader and more rueful than that. No one in this movie is completely free of self-delusion and duplicity, not even Mary herself, who mainly wants to make out at the roller rink with a sweet stoner boy named Jamie (Victor Jory) and would rather not think about the tormented country her parents fled when she was a baby.     “Maryam” opens with newsreel footage of the Shah of Iran presiding over opulent state functions and then scenes of the joyous yet terrifying mobs in the streets of Tehran following his ouster. (All while the Cars’ “Let the Good Times Roll” is nervously throbbing on the soundtrack; if using pop hits to accompany period footage is something of a cliché, Serry wields it wittily.) Even those of you with only dim memories of the Reagan era should know what’s coming next: Americans are about to get a crash course in the Iranian Revolution, and the members of Mary’s assimilated middle-class immigrant family will become undesirable aliens virtually overnight.     Even before the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Mary’s so-called life begins to get complicated. Her courtly father (Shaun Toub), who clearly adores her beyond reason, won’t let her go to parties and monitors her after-school activities like a bird of prey guarding its young. She’s embarrassed by his old-world manners and accent, but then her cousin Ali (David Ackert), a Muslim who supports the Ayatollah Khomeini, arrives from Iran to attend graduate school. From the start, there’s a combative, semi-flirtatious relationship between this devout, handsome student and his bratty American cousin, which Serry and the two actors handle with wonderful grace, neither pushing things too far nor letting the question drop. Of course he can’t touch her, not even to shake hands or in cousinly horseplay, which only heightens the not quite sexual, not quite intellectual tension between them.     Parris plays Mary with such ease, such relaxed commitment, that it’s startling to learn the young actress is actually British; not only is her American accent flawless but there isn’t a hint of self-consciousness to her performance. Like the children of immigrants from all over the world, Mary starts to dig, at first cautiously and then eagerly, into the secrets her parents left behind in the old country. What happened between Mary’s father, his brother (that is, Ali’s father) and the Shah’s secret police? Why has Ali brought a backgammon board stained with blood as a “gift” for Mary’s dad?     In a somewhat muddled (if eerie) subplot, Ali becomes involved with a student group protesting the exiled Shah’s presence at a New York hospital. Perhaps confusing his anger toward Mary’s father with his anger toward the Shah, he becomes increasingly drawn to the possibility of violent retribution.     Although the principal players (including Shohreh Aghdashloo, a prominent Iranian theater actress, as Mary’s elegant, tolerant mother) are all terrific, the acting and directing in “Maryam” are weaker when Serry moves away from his central focus. The actors portraying a Marxist radical and an immigration agent are especially unconvincing.     After the hostage crisis begins in Tehran, the Armins’ suburban town begins to turn against them, although here again Serry never overstates matters, especially considering how despicably some Americans behaved at the time. Mary’s car is vandalized at school and bigots throw a brick through the front window of the house. But the Armins’ next-door neighbors, after some hesitation, finally do them a great service when the pressure threatens to tear the family apart.     If “Maryam” gains a little added resonance in the wake of last fall, none of it is cheap or simplistic. This movie may not have the highest production values you’ve ever seen, but it’s the work of an artist, one whose view of America, history and the awkwardness of human life is generous and deep. Serry is capable of distilling everything important in his movie into one scene, the tragic and hilarious roller-rink episode, with almost no dialogue.     In one corner of the room is Ali, trying desperately to cling to his sense of himself amid the pot smoke and the pulsating beat of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” On the skating floor, arm in arm with Jamie, is Mary or Maryam or whoever she is, her face aglow, not being an Iranian or an American or anything except a sheltered teenager set free for a few minutes in roller-disco heaven.           [back to top]         “Maryam” hits nerve November 8, 2000 BY ROGER EBERT     HONOLULU, Hawaii--It must not have been easy to be an Iranian-American teenager in 1979, going to high school while your neighbors were tying yellow ribbons ’round their old oak trees. Especially since some of your neighbors probably were too dim to figure out that the Iranians in America were mostly pro-shah and not supporters of the hostage takers. “Iranians, go home,” the mobs shouted, waving their flags while contradicting the American idea.     “Maryam,” an extraordinary film playing here at the 20th Hawaii International Film Festival, tells the story of an Iranian-American family in New Jersey, balanced precariously between the values of their former land and their new one.     It’s seen mostly through the eyes of their 16-year-old daughter, Maryam (Mariam Parris), who likes to be called Mary. She’s a good student, wise and centered, with a good sense of humor, which she needs. Her father (Shaun Toub) is a local doctor; her mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is a housewife. It is a convention in movies about immigrant families to show the parents as strict, forbidding monsters, but actually Mary’s parents are reasonable and loving, even if her dad has firm rules against serious dating, lipstick, stuff like that.     A cousin named Ali (David Ackert) arrives from Iran to study physics at the local university. Within the last year, he has become an observant Muslim and an admirer of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Mary’s parents, who are not so religious, prospered under the shah. Ali moves into a spare bedroom, bringing the tensions of Iran to New Jersey, just at the time when hostages are taken at the American embassy in Teheran and anti-Iran sentiment in the United States becomes a fever. Fictional scenes are underlined by TV news footage from the time.     The movie could have been a shrill political statement, but is not. The writer-director, Ramin Serry, wants to observe, to empathize. Mary has a shy romance with a boyfriend. She’s active as a newscaster on the school’s closed-circuit TV station. The blond bimbos who hang out in the restroom, smoking, make crude remarks about her Iranian background, which she deflects with intelligence and irony. But then the shah flies to New York, seeking treatment for his cancer, and Ali is seized with revolutionary fervor.     I left the theater admiring the movie not only for its ideas (it urges us to see people, not labels), but also by its artistry: In a time when most movie teenagers are bubbleheaded pawns in sex comedies, here is a teenager with brains and courage, who doesn’t simply rebel against her parents but wants to understand them, and who doesn’t collapse into weeping victimhood but depends on her mind and values. “Maryam” is powerful, important and very moving.           [back to top]
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