This paper will explore how select filmmakers of the Iranian New Wave offer a complex and nuanced view of gender identity in the Middle East. It will argue that they have created a distinct postmodern cinema that fuses European neo-realist visual elements with traditional Iranian storytelling forms that are complex reflections on human emotion. Like Abbas Kiorastami, they create visual cinematic poems often with children as the central characters. But while the directors of The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995), The Girl with the Sneakers (Rasul Sadrameli, 2000), The Circle (2000, Jafar Panahi) and The Day I became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2001), also employ adolescents or children to critique contemporary society; they present viewers with a complex portrait of gender in contemporary Iran. I suggest that they offer a more nuanced view of the Iranian public sphere and of the girls and young women who quickly move through its center or inhabit its margins. They do so by creating an open narrative--a story with no clear beginning and no neat resolution. These directors communicate more through the characters' ambiguous visual gestures than through plot or dialogue. In other words, Meshkini, Panahi and Sadrameli do not follow the Hollywood narrative style nor do they give us a Bergman-like portrait of the characters' inner turmoil. As such, these films do not contain the obvious political commentary that directors in the West might have imparted (as in the neo-liberal films of Doris D rrie and other European directors). Though the films of the New Wave reflect a distinct Iranian aesthetic, the lack of narrative resolution is very much in keeping with earlier principles established by "Third Cinema" non-Western filmmakers. While the latter championed the oppressed, many did not provide obvious solutions as to how those politically marginalized should remedy their situations. As noted by Julie F. Codell (2007), "the goal of Third Cinema was to activate spectators to become agents of their own political destiny through a democratized cinema" (p. 361). Although young Iranian women and girls are hardly agents of their own destinies in contemporary New Wave Iranian cinema, nevertheless directors of these films suggest the possibility that they have some control over their choices and thus their lives. In this regard, the cinematic screen functions as a site for public discourse----something that earlier Third World directors would have undoubtedly applauded.