The film Not Without My Daughter presents two encounters between the West and Iran. The first is that of Betty Mahmoody, on who's reported experiences the film is based. The second is the filmmakers' rendering of those experiences in dramatic form. Neither response to the culture of Iran or to life in that nation around 1984 is free of the hysteria generated by Western media portrayals in the 1970s and 1980s of the Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamic 'fundamentalism', and stereotypes of Islamic life in the Middle East. But neither response is wholly dominated by these factors and Mahmoody's experience, no matter what elements of personal ignorance or cultural arrogance were involved, is justifiably portrayed as extremely frightening. The chief problem with the encounter as depicted in the film is that what is a personal dilemma for Mahmoody -- in which cultural differences affect a family -- is generalized as if it was capable of explaining, typifying, or symbolizing relations between whole cultures or between nations. The difficulty with this, of course, is that elements of internal relations among the Mahmoody family (e.g., the wife's ignorance or the husband's deception) or even the circumstances of their lives (e.g., the behavior of Mahmoody's family in Iran or his working experience in Michigan hospitals) are hardly typical. Nor are these personal experiences, or the genuine intercultural issues that they raise at a personal level, germane to the problem of relations between cultures and nations.
In brief outline the story of the film, based on Mahmoody's memoir, concerns the family of an Iranian doctor, trained in the United States, who works in a hospital in central Michigan. The story takes place in 1984, however the recent events in Iran impacted the Mahmoody family in America. The Revolution of the 1970s, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini had created extensive anti-Americanism in the Islamic country of Iran. ...