Two Women (Do zan) is a 1999 Iranian motion picture written and directed by Tahmineh Milani. Two Women charts the lives of two promising architecture students over the course of the first turbulent years of the Islamic Republic, creating a portrait of traditions that conspire to trap women and stop them from realizing their full potential. In an extensive interview, Tahmineh Milani stated that the name Two Women alluded to two different potential life-stories of one woman. The film won the best screenplay award at Iran's Fajr Film Festival in 1999 as well as Best Actress for Niki Karimi's part in the Taormina Film Festival. Plot The film starts at some fourteen years after Fereshteh (Niki Karimi) and Royā (Merilā Zāre'í) became friends, while studying architecture at a university in Tehran. Fereshteh's husband is in the ICU and she needs Roya's help. The events in the life of Fereshteh over the course of the preceding fourteen years are revealed through a series of flashbacks that represent Feresheh's and Royā's reminiscences. Fereshteh, whose family lives in reduced circumstances in Esfahan, is an excellent student who brims with hopes and expectations for her future and what she would do for her family on graduating. A voracious reader, she seems to know almost everything and is ready to face any difficulty, she has no interest in marrying just yet but instead wants to build a successful career. Fereshteh supports herself financially through giving private tuitions to fellow students. Royā's family, on the other hand, are wealthy. She becomes one of Fereshteh's private pupils and through this a deep friendship develops between the two. Fereshteh is stalked by an obsessive young man, named Hassan (Mohammad-Rezā Foroutan), who stops at nothing for gaining her attention and, as he puts it, marrying her. He stirs up many problems, including inflicting serious bodily harm by throwing acid to Fereshteh's cousin on mistaking him as Fereshteh's boyfriend. This prompts Fereshteh's father (Rezā Khāndān) forcing her to return to their home in Esfahan (although Fereshteh lives independently in a university dormitory, she is formally in the care of her uncle, her father's brother, who lives in Tehran); through some inverted logic, the father believes that the actions of the stalker must have been provoked by some impropriety on the part of his daughter. These events take place at the time when the universities are being closed by the government