Seyed Morteza, a pigeon fancier, lives in Kashan with his blind mother. He captures a ring-necked dove that all the local dove fanciers are after. His mother considers the dove a bad omen and asks Seyed Morteza to let it go. Meanwhile, Seyed Morteza’s uncle, Seyed Mostafa, sends him to Shiraz to propose to his fiancée, Tooba. Morteza and Tooba fall in love and get married. Morteza brings Tooba back to Kashan but tells nothing about it to his mother or his uncle. His mother discovers their relationship and, believing Morteza has betrayed them, curses him. Mostafa arrives and overhears her words...

An official is sent from his home in Tehran to hear the final appeal of a woman sentenced to death, a political prisoner. The official's wife of nearly 20 years, Fereshteh Samimi, writes him a letter to read when he reaches the hotel - the story of her student days during the revolution of 1978. We see the story in flashbacks as he reads: she leaves her province on scholarship, joins a Communist youth group, avoids arrest, and comes under the sway of a suave older man, Roozbeh Javid, a literary-magazine editor. As she tells her husband about the hidden half of her life, Fereshteh asks that he listen to the woman facing execution, a woman and therefore one of Iran's hidden half.

2005 film by Majid Majidi