As the lights at Arclight's swanky movie theater go up at the end of Mania Akbari's 20 Fingers at Los Angeles' 2004 AFI Film Festival, a swarthy Iranian gentleman seated more or less center/center stands up and begins the Q&A session with the following in Farsi:

And that wasn't all. After he had received a measured answer from the director–she acknowledged there were many forms of cinema, and that a plot-driven drama that might have appealed to him was not the film she was interested in making–her interlocutor stood up again to rail against the film and ask his second question: Why did this film not resemble another film he'd seen and liked much more, Shabeh Yalda, which also dealt with relationships?

There was more to come…

As Akbari (born 1974), an attractive 30-year-old Iranian woman with close-cropped short hair, walked out of the movie theater at the end of this official Q&A, a slightly older Iranian came up weeping and accused her of propagating, “lies and filth” about Iranians and their relationships, “up there on the screen.”