Since its inception, the Sundance Film Festival has been attracting independent film makers with the opportunity to show their work to a discerning audience and this year was no different. But with each year, the festival seems to get larger, so much so that some independent film makers with a unique voice risk getting lost in the shuffle.

One such event which was barely covered by the international press was the screening of award winning Iranian-born filmmaker NAHID PERSSON’S documentary, The Queen and I, which was shown six times at Sundance to a full house. The film follows the director on her two-year, complex relationship with Iran’s former Empress Farah Pahlavi. Persson, a former communist who took part in the 1979 revolution, was a somewhat unexpected candidate to produce a documentary on the Iranian royal.

As a teenager, NAHID PERSSON SARVESTANI joined the Communist faction of Khomeini’s revolution that deposed the shah. When mass executions began under the new regime, Persson Sarvestani’s 17-year-old brother was among the dead. Ironically, she too ended up having to flee Iran, and has lived in Sweden for 30 years. Nahid’s social-political films have won her over 25 awards including an International Emmy nomination for “Prostitution Behind the Veil,” and the release of her current film, “The Queen and I” coincides with the 30-year anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

Yet despite taking part in the revolution which ousted the Shah and brought down the monarchy in Iran, Nahid has always been fascinated by the Shah’s wife, FARAH DIBA. It is to this seemingly unlikely subject that she has turned to so many years after the revolution inoder to find answers to lingering questions. During the two years of filming her former adversary there were many moments of disagreement, but also of surprise and revelation. The film unfolds as a meeting between two women who have much more in common than either of them might have imagined.

They agree to meet in Paris, where Farah has lived for some time. There, protected by French bodyguards, she lives a privileged existence, maintaining an appropriately regal air even three decades after her family fled Iran. We witness the excited reactions of fellow patrons who spot her at a café and see her prepare to take a private jet to Rome to visit her old friend, the designer Valentino.

Over the course of filming, Persson entered the queen’s world planning to challenge the shah’s ideology; instead she finds herself having to rethink her own. Yet, in the struggle to understand each other’s experiences, an unlikely friendship blossoms. In this gripping, poignant consideration of subjectivity as truth, we learn that it is people who write history and therefore have the ability to also heal it. Part history, part character study and part journey of self-discovery, The Queen and I couldn’t be more relevant as we reach across our own political aisles.