By contrast, the HBO2 documentary The Queen and I is a story of reconciliation -- but not between Iran and the United States. Rather, it's a searingly personal encounter between Iranian exile filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani, who as a teenaged Communist militant helped topple the shah, and the deposed Queen Farah.

As a child in a dirt-poor Iranian household, Sarvestani nursed a fairy-tale fascination for the wealthy queen she followed on TV that turned to loathing as her politics turned left. But when the Islamic government that followed the shah's executed her 17-year-old brother for passing out protest leaflets and Sarvestani followed Queen Farah into exile, her attitude wavered again.

Though The Queen and I starts as a traditional documentary, it soon turns into a personal confessional. ''This film has a mind of its own,'' says Sarvestani, admitting that she's charmed by the queen -- as most viewers will be. Though Farah faithfully carries out her symbolic duties as the last icon of the dwindling ranks of Iran's exiled monarchists, in private moments she exudes a sweet quirkiness, sending her old iPod to a one Iranian stranger who has the temerity to ask for it, telephoning another who writes from Tehran that he'd like to talk politics and history with her someday.

Farah sidesteps some questions about the repression of the shah's government, but Sarvestani admits it's not so different than her own reluctance to contemplate what guilt she bears for luring her brother into the political activism that killed him. In the end, as Farah breaks into tears while discussing a daughter who died in a London hotel room of a drug overdose, the two women with such different politics are bound together by the heartbreak of exile and roads not taken.

`BE LIKE OTHERS'

Another sort of heartbreak figures in Be Like Others, young Iranian-American director Tanaz Eshaghian's startling film about Tehran transsexuals. In what seems like a strange glint of liberalism in Iran's stark fundamentalist landscape, sex-change surgery is legal, even though homosexuality is a capital offense.

But as Be Like Others follows several patients through the surgery, it's soon obvious that changing genders in Iran is like changing cells in a prison. Ostracism, not just by society but families, too (one young man preparing for surgery says his father calls every day: ''He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me'') and the only real profession open to the transgendered is prostitution under the guise of ''temporary Islamic marriages'' that last just an hour.

It's not even clear how many patients seeking the surgery are truly transgendered -- that is, born with different physical and mental genders. Some are almost certainly gays seeking to avoid execution for their homosexuality. Certainly most of the young people in Be Like Others would prefer to simply live on the undefined frontiers of gender rather than go through the painful, life-shortening surgery they've signed up for. Says one despondent young woman-to-be: ``This is just the beginning of hell.''

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