Persepolis ( Persian City) is a very entertaining film based on an autobiographical graphic novel written by the co-director of this film, Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian who grew up in the late 70s in Iran. The film traces about 20 years of Marjane's life from the beginning in Iran with the ruling Shahs, their downfall, the Iran-Iraq war, her stay in Vienna and then life back in Iran under the religious mullahs and then finally her departure to Paris.

Shot in slick, dark, powerful animation, the film starts of bright and brilliant with a young Marjane living with her parents under the rule of the Shahs. She is a fiesty young girl, curious and determined. She is a joy to watch and you root for her cause. Her narrative is smooth and appropriate as she leads you through the various different incidences that start to change her wonderful life into something quite different as the revolutionaries take over.

As the heroine grows up and out the film starts to lose some of its grip. With Marjane, the film seems to sink into some depression as well. The politics that rends Marjane's life also blunts the appeal of the film a bit and at times, in Marjane's dislocation, it looks pretty much like your routine immigration experience film. However, the film's politics is very clear in its belief that politics basically sucks.

Marjane is ultimately the classical modern immigrant: one who is as lost in their own culture as they are in the new one they try to flee in to.