Babak, an Iranian student in Greece, doesn't show up to welcome his visiting parents at the Athens airport. Pari and her older husband, both devout Muslims abroad for the first time, are ill-prepared to search for their son in an intimidating and alien environment. All their attempts to find a clue that might lead them to him prove to be in vain and they soon reach a dead end. But Pari can't give up looking for him, even when returning to Iran seems like her only choice. Following the steps of her rebellious son in the darkest corners of the city, she will exhaust her inner strength to achieve more than a mother's search for her missing son.

The film relates the story of a surgeon (Doctor Pārsā) who returns to Iran after living in Germany for 33 years. Arriving in Tehran, Doctor Pārsā performs a heart operation on the nephew of the family friend Mr Ghanāti. Mr Ghanāti urges him to travel with him to his home town, Bam. On the trip, they drive past the rubble and destruction and Pārsā remembers back to his childhood.[citation needed]

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.