'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.