In the opening shot of Daughters Of The Sun, the promising debut feature of Iranian director Maryam Shahriar, a young woman (Altinay Ghelich Taghani) sits patiently as her head is shaved, her countenance suggesting an understanding that this is only the first of many sacrifices. In an act of desperation, Taghani's family has charged her with supporting it. Dressed as a man and apprenticed to a rug maker, she sets off to make her way in the world, but her disguise does little to protect her from its iniquities. As the overseer of a small force of women weavers, Taghani excels as an artisan and fails as a manager because she seems to lack the capacity for cruelty demanded by a boss who keeps his employees locked up by day, steals their mail, and threatens physical punishment for such professional mistakes as bleeding on the merchandise. With Daughters, Shahriar employs a tested technique for making covert political statements, dwelling on the details of a particular situation to such a degree that charges of sedition don't quite stick. It doesn't take much stretching, however, to see Daughters as a comment on the treatment of women in contemporary Iran, and such comments have begun to arrive with some regularity. (All of which could change with the fate of Tahmineh Milani, a female filmmaker currently facing charges punishable by execution after a film met with the displeasure of Iran's clerical authorities.) Daughters Of The Sun never quite finds the rhythm of a great film, and it scores no points for subtlety by including a subplot about a horse breaking free of its master, but Shahriar displays a real gift for conveying Taghani's plight in all its grimness. Marriage offers the only escape from her coworkers' servitude, but that escape is often just another trap. One woman invites another to her wedding with a tone better suited for a funeral, and when the film pauses to capture a dilapidated carnival ride housed nearby, its promise of fun might as well belong to another planet.