World Premiere: Screening in the U.S. Documentary Film Competition

In Iran, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, but sex-change operations are legal according to Islamic law, a generation of young men are compelled to make an agonizing choice.

In Iran, according to Islamic law, homosexuality is punishable by death. Ironically, sex-change operations are not only legal, they are embraced by a society that accepts male or female but nothing in between. Iran's gender reassignment industry is in a veritable boom. Attracted to members of the same sex, yet forced to deny their true selves, a young generation of men and women adopt the only identity legally allowed for them - transsexual. Socially conditioned and shamed into denying their sexuality, queer youths resort, seemingly willingly, to a most drastic measure: gender reassignment surgery. Every day in the Tehran medical office of Dr. Bahram Mir-Jalali, the country's most prominent sex-change surgeon, the waiting room is filled with new candidates for gender reassignment. The doctor, a hero to his patients, performs more sex-change operations in a year than the entire country of France does in ten years. Seen through the lens of those living on the fringes, Be Like Others is a provocative testament to the lengths some people will go to conform. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has notoriously proclaimed that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Oddly enough he's right. Now we know why.

Clip Description

In Iran, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, but sex-change operations are legal according to Islamic law, a generation of young men are compelled to make an agonizing choice. Meet twenty something year old men, grappling to find their identities in a setting that, paradoxically, deems only one outcome acceptable.