'They
Want Us To Emigrate'
By Dan de Luce
10 June, 2004
The Guardian
In
the arid mountains of eastern Iran, director Babak Payami devoted long
hours to making his latest film using a minimum of artificial light.
At the end of this painstaking project, Iranian plain-clothes security
agents seized the negative and Payami has not seen it since. Although
he managed to create a second version of Silence Between Two Thoughts
from computer files in an Italian studio, much of what he had been trying
to accomplish with light was lost. When he saw the new version, Payami
says, he felt crushed: "I was alone in a little lab and I cried
my eyes out through the entire film."
Silence Between Two Thoughts tells the story of an executioner who begins
to doubt his own blind faith. Although he felt the technical standard
was flawed, Payami has allowed his film to be screened at festivals,
and this Friday it gets a British release. "I would have preferred
not to have shown the film but it was a matter of principle," he
says.
Until recently,
the state-regulated film industry in Iran had remained the one aspect
of cultural life that had somehow circumvented the regime's suffocating
influence. But since the recent appointment of conservative apparatchiks
who vet films, the atmosphere has deteriorated. Payami's agonising experience
illustrates the mounting censorship and restrictions faced by Iranian
film-makers in recent years. Ambiguous rules are enforced in an unpredictable
and arbitrary fashion. The authorities who confiscated Payami's film,
and who detained and interrogated him, had not even seen it.
Following the 1979
revolution, film-makers have had to contend with strict censorship that
forbids showing couples touching, or a woman without Islamic garments
that hide her hair and body shape. These ideological restrictions may
explain why some of the greatest Iranian films focus on children's lives
or portray life outside on the street rather than inside the home.
Beyond these explicit
rules, the conservative takeover of the government department controlling
the film industry has meant that permits for scripts, for production
and film screenings are getting harder to come by. Many now wielding
authority over the industry - including Mohammad Mehdi Heydarian, deputy
minister of film in the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance - used
to work at the state television monopoly, which churns out ideologically
correct programmes and has ties to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei.
On May 4 the ministry
denied permission to the award-winning director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to
make a new film entitled Amnesia. Makhmalbaf, director of Kandahar,
had been working on the script for years and had planned to start filming
last month. "It seems that the new censorship strategy intends
to push the Iranian artists to migrate from the country," Makhmalbaf
said in a statement. The director and his movie-making family often
have found it easier to operate in neighbouring Afghanistan than under
the stifling bureaucracy in Iran. The past three films made by the country's
most prominent director, Abbas Kiarostami, have been banned from Iranian
cinemas.
Although intriguing
films keep winning awards at international festivals, there are fears
that the climate of repression is taking its toll. The film A House
Built on Water won six awards at Iran's film festival last year but
after its premiere, the authorities demanded numerous cuts and deleted
three scenes. Afterward, the film's director, Bahman Fahmanara, was
in despair at having his film sliced up by a committee of bureaucrats
and hinted that he might retire from domestic film production. "My
knees are too old to dance to the tune they play for me," he was
quoted as saying.
Foreign film critics
often describe Iran's distinctive cinema as a response to the country's
1979 revolution, which installed clerical rule and strict Islamic censorship
of the arts. But the films' oblique, subtle approaches represent an
artistic tradition in a society that has never experienced genuine freedom
of expression. According to Payami, these subtle methods grow out of
a culture defined by poetry that has always employed indirect language
and double meanings to broach taboo subjects. "Everybody seems
to attribute the style of Iranian cinema only to the post-revolutionary
era, but it has been nurtured over the course of centuries. The cultural
keys are there in the poetry. The creative use of the Farsi language
and grammar can be very colourful and multi-layered. So this is nothing
new."
Moreover, film-makers
find it patronising when outsiders credit censorship with bringing out
the best in Iranian directors. "I think romanticising censorship
is a great disservice to Iranian artists," says Maziar Bahari,
a documentary-maker from Tehran. "Censorship has had a negative
effect on Iranian arts for centuries. I believe without censorship we
would have many other great artists and film-makers whose talent and
effort cannot bear fruit because of governmental, religious and social
restrictions."
In Iran, writing
about films can be more risky than actually making one. Several film
critics and the editor of a film magazine were arrested and charged
last year. They were later released after interrogation. Some of them
have since gone silent, some have been used to entrap others and one
writer has secured asylum in a European country, according to human
rights monitors.
One former member
of the Islamic clergy with an affection for film has been singled out
for punishment. Ali Afsahi, a professor of cinema and an Islamic cleric,
has been defrocked, imprisoned three times and stripped of his teaching
privileges because of his passion for western films. Afsahi held screenings
of his favourite films for students and fellow clergy, trying to defend
cinema as a legitimate art form. He believes film can provide a window
into the soul and into Islam itself. Afsahi even dared to show Natural
Born Killers to a group of clerics, many of whom were deeply offended
and angered. In court, he refused to recant his enthusiasm for Ingmar
Bergman and Oliver Stone, and offered to show western films to the judge
who convicted him.
The same clerical
establishment that took a dim view of Afsahi helped ban the most popular
film in Iran for years, The Lizard. The movie gently mocks the country's
clergy and broke box-office records last month until it was belatedly
pulled from cinemas. The Lizard, in which a thief escapes prison by
donning clerical robes, was not a product of the avant-garde film-making
elite and had a sentimental theme, in which the main character finds
God through his experience. Having granted permission to screen The
Lizard, allowing tens of thousands of people to see the film, the ministry
of culture changed its mind following a hostile reaction by hardline
ideologues and their supporters.
With the breathing
space for cinema shrinking, film-makers may soon have to choose between
sacrificing artistic freedom or working in exile and sacrificing ties
to their homeland. Payami is searching for a producer for his next project,
the story of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the Italian painter condemned
by church authorities for depicting religious figures as ordinary peasants.
"It's about an artist fleeing the Inquisition." Iranian film-makers
should have no trouble identifying with that story.
· Silence
Between Two Thoughts is released tomorrow. Maziar Bahari's documentary
on Aids in Iran, Mohammad and the Matchmaker, is screened on BBC2 next
Wednesday at 10pm.