Maryam

Writer-director Ramin Serry's rough but charming debut feature is set in the late 1970s, but its subject — ethnic profiling during a time of international crisis — could hardly be more contemporary. It's 1979, the year of Iran's Islamic Revolution: The Shah has been deposed and the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini has made a triumphant return. In suburban New Jersey, Mary Armin (Marriam Parris), an ambitious Iranian-American high-school student, awaits the arrival of her Iranian cousin, Ali (David Ackert), who's coming to study physics at the local university. Ali, whose father was killed years earlier under mysterious circumstances involving the Shah's secret pol...