Iran as few westerners have seen it- multicultural, immense, astonishingly diverse, hauntingly beautiful. The film is an exercise in poetic cartography that takes in the vast sweep of this ancient, tragic land, tracing not just the length and breadth of its geography- from its rugged, mountainous rim and high, central basin with deserts to the small, discontinuous plains along both coasts -but also the entire arc of its history as a nation-state, from the earliest Persian tribes to the present-day's theocratic republic and its ongoing, difficult confrontation with modernity. The mesmerizing weave of music, image and sound offers an imaginative and general picture of a country and a society. The variety of the climatic and natural conditions- deserts, forests, marine coasts and mountains -and the lives of the numerous ethnic groups living in the country as well as their cultures, rites and religions, are all observed with great attention and fidelity.