Marjane Satrap grew up in Tehran where she attended a French high school. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in Vienna, where she discovered the joy of shopping but was also terribly homesick. One day she went to the airport with the intention of returning home, but she just spent the whole day there, crying and watching the planes take off. This is the opening scene to the animated film, produced in the ‘traditional’ way rather than using computer graphics. It is based on the three graphic novels she has written about her life. She tells of the precocious nine-year-old growing up in Iran and how her life changed after the overthrow of the Shah and the outbreak of the war with Iraq. Marjane was fourteen when her parents, worried about her outspokenness as fundamentalists took power, sent her to school in Austria.

Marjane effectively shows what it means for a young girl to be thrown into the middle of historic events that she cannot understand. After high school, she returned home to a vastly different country and had difficulty coping with the hypocrisy surrounding her. She finally settled in France and wanted to show the rest of the world how complex things have been for people in her homeland. As Danielle Darrieux, who voices Marjane’s grandmother, says her story has the ability to make people laugh and cry. Even though she relates very grim times, it is her wry humour that keeps you laughing because, Satrapi notes, ‘laughter is the most subversive weapon of all’.

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Rated M and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parannaud