An examination of the work and lives of actresses in the Iranian film industry prior to the 1979 revolution, featuring myriad interviews and rare film clips.
A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.
Maryam believes that she does not have much time to live, but two foresights cause her to reject her own feelings. A fortune teller informs her about an engineer proposing her with flower. On the other hand, a wandered gypsy has seen a passenger in white who has taken Maryam to cure her disease. Anyway, she marries, but this is not an end for her way.
On his holiday, Mr. Hieroglyph wakes up tumultuous and goes to the office. He sees some signs on the screen of his computer written in hieroglyph. He goes to the central library to discover the lines. He finds a thesis his daughter has written when she was a student. By using the thesis, he reviews the story of his daughter. In the past years, she has gone to the factories and then was assigned by a political group to organize a group of mine workers to fight. Recommendations made by the girl and her friends are opposed to the opinions of the leaders. The girl distributes a leaflet on behalf of the workers which results in a disturbance. She escapes and after a while she is killed in a street struggle.
A director of a television series on the history of cinema, who has been grappling with the screenplay of his first feature film, receives an assignment to oversee the installation of a television relay station in a remote region of Zahedan province. He has already hired Turkmen tribespeople for his film and selected his filming location. Meanwhile his wife, who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation about the Mongol invasion of Iran, attempts to dissuade him from accepting the assignment. One night, while working on his history of the cinema series, the director fantasizes a diegetic world that consists of clever juxtapositions of his different worlds: the history of cinema, the history of the mongol invasion, his own film idea and his imminent assignment to the desert.