BE LIKE OTHERS

"Explaining why they want to have surgery, they would say, ‘I want to live like everybody else. I want to be like others. I'm not a weirdo... I'm not a homosexual. I'm not filthy.'" - filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian

In a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, the state has discovered a ‘cure'. Welcome to Iran, where male is male and female is female - with nothing in between; where a 1979 fatwa authorised sex-change operations for ‘diagnosed transsexuals' and one doctor alone has performed more ‘gender reassignments' in one year than the entire country of France has seen in 10 years.
Be Like Others takes us inside the realm of institutionalised shame, where homosexuality can be erased by a ‘simple' change in gender and where gay men are forced to find acceptance under the surgeon's knife.
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D/P Tanaz Eshaghian WS Greenberg Traurig L Farsi w/English subtitles TD digibeta/2008/74mins