Approaching thirty is an interesting time for a woman. Many have weddings and many simply attend the weddings of those who have them. Either way, marriage suddenly becomes a dominant theme. Or rather, let me correct myself: weddings become a dominant theme. As a late twenty-something unmarried woman, I have witnessed many a bride walk down the aisle to the man of her dreams. I have attended spectacular parties, feasted on caviar and drunk far too much champagne. But for many brides this day of uttermost happiness is often transformed into one of sheer stress and panic, at times even disappointment (!), about stuff. The wedding cake, the programmes, the flowers, the rings, the music... Weddings have become a multi-billion dollar industry, while nearly half of all marriages in the United States end in a courtroom. The term "bridezilla" has become a widely recognised phenomenon, as has what psychiatrists now call "post-marital depression". What has happened to the reason people get married? Whatever happened to love?

While Western brides worry about outdoing each other's weddings, men and women are blowing each other up in other parts of the world, children are starving to death in parts of Africa, and AIDS threatens to wipe out the rest of the same continent. The amount of suffering that goes on in this world is extraordinary. But in the Western world, it's easy to forget these things. More often than not, we live in a bubble, which is rarely disturbed by the traumatic events that affect so much of the world. I wanted therefore to make a film that would fuse these complete extremes together; a day of sheer happiness with total tragedy, enormous privilege with tremendous suffering, all of which I wanted to embody in an American woman and an Iranian man. I wanted to explore the meaning of love and how enormously precious it is, when we have found it. I wanted to strip away all pretension, where nothing else matters but the human being at hand. All of this, I hoped, would remind my protagonist, Marissa, and us viewers, of everything we tend to forget that we are just so, so lucky to have.