Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi co-directed Persepolis with Vincent Paronnaud in 2007, adapted from her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. The film won the Cannes Jury Prize, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and won the César for Best First Feature. It was banned in several Arab states; Iran's officially state-supported response was to denounce it as anti-Iranian propaganda.

The film follows Satrapi's own childhood in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, then the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and her teenage exile in Vienna and Paris during the 1990s. Chiara Mastroianni voices the adult Marjane, with Catherine Deneuve as her mother, Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother and Simon Abkarian as her father, an unusually starry voice cast for an animated feature. The animation, almost entirely 2D black-and-white with occasional colour washes, is built from Satrapi's own graphic-novel style: large blocks of black, simplified faces, expressive negative space.

The film's political register (alternating between intimate family memoir and public-historical witness) became a model for autobiographical animation that Waltz with Bashir and Flee would later extend. The grandmother's advice (bring jasmine; the world is full of idiots) is the film's quiet motto.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved European animation could be a serious literary form. Satrapi's specific testimony (woman, Iranian, Marxist, exile) has lost none of its force, and the closing taxi ride remains one of the great melancholy endings.