SFJFF: <i>Love Iranian American Style</i>

What's a hottie with a body, a good personality and an ivy league education have to do to find a husband these days? Well, if you're an Iranian-American Jew (or really any Americanized member of an immigrant group), the answer is plenty.

Love Iranian-American Style (Ed note: we'd link to the film itself, but the SFJFF site won't let us. We hate that!) played at the 26th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on Saturday and the filmmaker, Tanaz Eshaghian, who chronicled her non-productive love life from the age of 25 to 29 was in attendance for the screening. She rolled the cameras for four years while her family harangued, kvetched, wheedled and begged her to find a nice Iranian-Jewish boy and settle down.

SFist MiHi Ahn, contributing

Apparently it hasn't happened yet and during the Q and A after the film a man stood up and said he loved the film and understood her plight--also being an Iranian-Jew with similar family pressures. The crowd in the Castro Theatre, who seemed to skew oddly into the grandparent/yenta demographic were thrown into a frenzy of matchmaking. Unable to contain herself, a woman behind us started yelling out "Get her number! Get her number!" From other corners of the Castro we heard other people yelling "Call her!" and there was a general increase in the buzzing and murmurs as the oldsters worked themselves into a lather.

Two problems for poor, beautiful, loveless Tanaz. The Iranian-Jewish community is very small and apparently short on enlightened modern men who will understand Tanaz's thoroughly American tortured artistic nature and expectations (ie: picky, romantic, idealized versions of love. Not that there's anything wrong with that). When she agrees to be set up by the family she has to deal with the type of dude who says stuff like, there are some women you want "to have fun with and some women you want to marry."

Tanaz rails against the Iranian-Jewish checklist of what makes for a suitable mate (money, good job, nice car) without factoring in the more intangible soul-mate, lovey-dovey stuff, yet in an interview with an ex-boyfriend who is not an Iranian-Jew, his critique of her is that she's got her own "checklists and boxes and that interferes with (her) perception of reality."

The person we really liked was Tanaz's mother. Also an educated woman who doesn't consider herself a traditional Iranian-Jew, she seems to understand her daughter but also the realities of relationships and societal expectations. When expressing that she herself is perhaps not as feminine as other Iranian-Jewish women she says charming things like, "I think I am tommy boy."

After the Q&A we saw the Iranian-Jewish man linger in the aisles with his friends while Tanaz was swarmed by the grannies. We're pretty sure he was waiting for her to be alone before he busted his move but the grannies were relentless and Tanaz had to escape out a side door since another movie was starting.

Love Iranian-American Style plays again August 1 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley and at the Mountain View Century on August 3.