In Chapter 8, Farahbakhsh’s Zendegi-ye Khosusi (Private Life, 2011) also draws on ways that the political becomes personal. Farahbakhsh not only focuses on the political environment of Iran in the 2010s, but he also highlights the inherent double standards found within government-endorsed sigheh. Highlighting the importance of sigheh marriages and the unsettling balance of the political and the personal, the manipulation of religion, double standards, and gendered inequality, Zendegi-ye Khosusi demonstrates the inimical power of patriarchy to protect and maintain male dominance. The film calls attention to women like Parisa, who are desired and lusted after initially, but as they pose threats and demand equal rights, they have to be eliminated. To complete her eradication from his life and keep his moral corruption a secret, Ebrahim, who initially lusted after Parisa, now uses his agency as an autonomous subject to objectify, victimize, and ultimately murder Parisa. Similar to Afkhami, Farahbakhsh depicts the politicization of the female body and sexuality in the context of sigheh under the Islamic regime. He uses the figure of Parisa to lay bare the religious and political hypocrisy and gender-related double standards inherent in the practice of sigheh.

In Chapter 7, I examine Behruz Afkhami’s Showkaran (Hemlock, 2000), set in 1995. Showkaran depicts Mahmud, a happily married man who finds himself stuck at the junction of religiosity and modernity. Afkhami exposes some key social problems, including sigheh marriages, and how religious regulations are used as a façade to justify social injustice. He sheds light on the double standards that dominate sigheh marriages and dramatizes how the political becomes personal as individuals strive for morality. Through the character of Sima, Afkhami pushes back against the social and moral corruption of the time, which is mapped onto a woman’s body that must ultimately be eliminated. By highlighting the role of sigheh marriages in maintaining the precarious balance of religiosity and modernity, the manipulation of religion, the societal and religious double standards imposed on women, marriage as an institution versus an intimate relationship, and politicization of the personal, Afkhami displays the complex aspects of sigheh marriages and the detrimental effects the practice has particularly on the personal lives of women, but also on society as a whole. Afkahmi portrays Sima who is “socially peripheral” as “symbolically central,” for she poses a grave threat to Mahmud's nekah marriage, and therein lies her power.