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Fleeing the Khomeinist regime with her family and arriving in France at the age of 8, Abnousse expected to come across Simone de Beauvoirs everywhere, on every street corner. However, she quickly became disillusioned and realized that the country where women's rights were declared was perhaps not so egalitarian after all. A child of the revolution, Abnousse Shalmani was born in 1977 in Tehran, Iran, a country she left at the age of eight for Paris, where she went into exile with her family in 1985. After studying history and modern literature, she took the path of journalism and then production, directing short films and writing scripts for documentaries and fiction. She would eventually return to her first passion, literature, by publishing her first book, Khomeiny, Sade et moi, with Grasset in 2014. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx