A new Iranian film, Asghar Farhadi’s Nader and Simin: A Separation, captures the painful moment:
The grim irony at the heart of Farhadi’s film is that the angst and perplexity are the fruit of a “sacred” republic of ideals. Here is the signal failure of the ideological state that Ayatollah Khomeini set up thirty-two years ago, promising truth and redemption for all, but whose children are still waiting for these things, trembling and alone.