Iranian American teenager Maryam seems identical to her suburban New Jersey friends: driving Dad's station wagon, gossiping in the school bathroom, and joining her parents' neighborhood parties and their middle-class chatter of deck-building, college admissions, and eyelash grooming. Her family's seemingly effortless assimilation into white-bread America becomes suddenly exposed, however, when the 1979 Iran hostage crisis breaks, causing neighbors to unveil casual ostracizing maneuvers and strangers to reveal far more threatening ones. The difference between Maryam and the roller-skating racists she thinks are her friends is further heightened by the arrival of her politicized cousin from Iran. Ali embodies a past and present she can barely fathom, and harbors a vision of her family history far different-and far more unsettling-than her own. Ramin Serry's debut film captures the divisions between Iranian Americans and the rest of America during the turbulent hostage era, and, more importantly, between factions within the Iranian community itself.-Jason Sanders