Iranian National Cinema

The Interaction of Policy, Genre, Funding and Reception

Anne Demy-Geroe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367219413
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000027198
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines transformations in the production and domestic and international reception of Iranian cinema between 2000 and 2013 through the intersection of the political markers – the presidential terms of Reformist president Mohammad Khatami and his successor, the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and filmic markers, particularly Jafar Panahi's The Circle (2000) and Asghar Farhadi's About Elly (2009).

Through extensive field and media research, the book considers the interaction of a range of factors including government policy, Iranian national cinema genres and categories, intended audience, funding source, and domestic and international reception, to demonstrate the interplay between filmmakers and the government over these two successive presidencies. While the impact of politics on Iranian filmmaking has been widely examined, this work argues for a more nuanced understanding of politics in and of the Iranian cinema than has generally been previously acknowledged.

Drawing on both personal experience as a juror at the Fajr International Film festival and interviews with significant filmmakers, producers, actors and other industry insiders, including senior bureaucrats and politicians, the volume is a key resource for anyone interested in politics and Iranian cinema.

1
Making “constructive” films

Generic themes and modulations

In 2007 one of the highest-grossing Iranian films of recent times, Masoud Dehnamaki’s The Outcasts (2007) came out, followed by two successful sequels, The Outcasts II (2009) and III (2011). The first of this slapstick comedy trilogy, a subversion of the Sacred Defence genre, tells the story of a working-class man from South Tehran (based on a real gangster) who falls in love with the daughter of a very pious man. He has just been released from prison but gives out that he is returning from Hajj. Obviously, our flawed hero, who among other sins prefers smoking to praying, must reform in order to marry her, and so he enlists in the war against Iraq with some of his mates. The humour lies in the portrayal of his interactions with both these mates and his beloved’s more pious father. The second part, also a subversion of the Sacred Defence genre, is quite daring. It opens with the martyrdom of our hero and then follows the capture of his friends by Iraqi forces. The final film, The Outcasts III (2011), moves away from the frontline to the homefront, following the electioneering of three candidates in the 2009 election, two of whom are the war veterans from the earlier films. Their cynical ploys to win the votes of young people through non-Islamic actions form the basis of the humour. The young “heroine” of this allegory, the aptly named Iran, is initially impressed by these candidates.

On their release, the political positioning of the whole trilogy was quite ambiguous. It is not that they were comedies, treading where comedies rarely did. Although this was remarkable, Kamal Tabrizi had set a precedent here with Sacred Defence – comedy hybrid Leily is with me (1996), about a television crew at the front. All three of these films were far more daring. In the first of the trilogy, The Outcasts, Dehnamaki mixed banned ‘decadent’ pop songs by exilic Iranians, a student protest song from both of Khatami’s campaigns, and official war songs with sacred references, “blur[ring] the lines between permissible/impermissible, and pious/impious” (Bajoghli).

It is the third part on which I will concentrate here. The ambiguity in Outcasts III is accentuated because the characters are composites of real politicians of opposing sides – for example, one of the candidates is nicknamed Mr Greenoff, suggesting an alignment with Mir Hossein Moussavi, the leader of the Green Movement, yet his mother demonstrates exaggerated superstition, which is normally associated with Ahmadinejad. Dehnamaki, a war veteran and first-time filmmaker, was a former head of the militia group, Ansar-e Hezbollah. It is then not surprising that, “In the post-2009 election atmosphere Dehnamaki [was] caught defending himself from both sides of the political spectrum” (Lotfalian, 218). Some considered it a critical satire that showed Dehnamaki as a reformed fundamentalist, while the heavy promotion that the film received on state television, and the fact that the opposition called for a boycott of this blatantly commercial film, suggested otherwise.

Political ambiguity was not the only factor under discussion at the time. In June 2010, between the release of the second and third parts of the trilogy, film producer Jahangir Kowsari described contemporary Iranian comedies produced for the home entertainment network as “culturally destructive” and noted that “[t]hese productions follow the same pattern as Iranian films produced in [the] 1970’s”. The Outcasts III was a 2011 Nowruz release. However, as a major producer, Kowsari would have been well aware of the contents of the third part of the trilogy and would have likely criticised the whole trilogy, connecting them all to the luti genre. Furthermore, he saw these comedies as being politically motivated, part of a cynical attempt by the Ahmadinejad presidency to attract people back to the cinemas (Modern Iranian comedies ruin). Connecting Ahmadinejad to pre-revolutionary work was a scathing comparison.

In 2013 I asked Javad Shamaqdari, deputy minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for Cinema and Audio-Visual Affairs, about how The Outcasts trilogy and Under the Peach Tree conformed to the government’s view of Muslim film-making. His response was that they, although entertainment, embraced and were able to promote Islamic values (Interview). This did not take me much further. In 2011 at the conference, Cinema in Iran: Circulation, Censorship, and Cultural Production, Mazyar Lotfalian had discussed various readings of the films. In 2015, in an article for a book based on the conference, he wrote that “the intelligentsia [viewed the film] as a back-handed pro-government story” while Dehnamaki was claiming a conspiracy by the government to curb the viewing of his film (218). Lotfalian also discussed the Ahmadinejad government’s cultural “risk management”, part of its strategy to “defuse social tension” by distracting the public from the highly charged political environment post-2009, although he does not specifically deal with this film in relation to risk management (221). Bajoghli, an anthropologist who has focused on Iranian media production, presented a slightly different perspective in 2017: “The 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president offered an opportunity for some pro-regime cultural producers to seek the creation of new forms of entertainment that could communicate the proper ideals of the revolution to the second and third generations and bring them back into the fold of the Islamic Republic.” However, the popularity of these films lay in the jokes that crossed the “red lines”, leading Bajoghli to the question of the effectiveness of such films to impart “a moral message about the ‘right’ way to be a patriotic, pious, Islamic, righteous, and revolutionary citizen”.

The official reading of the trilogy was finally clarified in 2018. The Outcasts was included in the 15th International Resistance Film Festival as part of a programme entitled “40 Years of Resistance Cinema” where it was voted one of the best films (Iran’s Sacred Defense cinema celebrated). Khomeini had once stated, “The film you make, if it happens to be constructive, will leave its positive mark all across the nation. If not, its misleading message will affect all throughout the country.” (32nd Fajr International Film Festival [Catalogue: 1] 2014). Perhaps heavy-handed religious or sacred defence films are preferred. However, films such as The Outcasts trilogy are tolerated and probably even encouraged as “constructive” for risk management.

The debate over the trilogy is indicative of the complexities involved in reading Iranian cinema generally and the emphasis that Iranians place on extratextual information to de-code and politically position films that are themselves available to quite different interpretations. While, of course, as others, including Maltby, have noted, films generally are open to many interpretations by viewers and the political exigencies in Iran, as in other countries with strong censorship regimes, encourage substantial ambiguities in production and, regardless of any signs from the filmmakers, divergent readings by both officialdom and the general viewer. This instance discusses a film that was permitted, possibly even encouraged, despite a mildly critical stance by the filmmaker. Conversely, the question is often why a film was banned. Ascertaining the correct answer is not easy. This gives the system its case-by-case caste. It also suggests that much extraneous information can and may need to be considered in determining reasons why films are acceptable or not.

A brief glance at any government structural chart indicates some of the problems that might arise in obtaining permits: the hierarchy is not vertical, and council and committees can cross-check and countermand each other. A permit granted by one section might be rescinded by another. Finally, it is not uncommon for a film to be granted a shooting permit by a committee, then to be refused a screening permit by the same committee because the constituents of that committee have changed, as several filmmakers noted to me (Milani Interview). In general, it is individuals who make decisions on production and screening permits, making the system ambiguous and arbitrary. These decisions may or may not be based on content. From the perspective of an official, there is the fear that a decision could be questioned or countermanded from any number of different sides. In a cinema where much meaning is buried in allegory and metaphor, and where extra-filmic information is inserted into the decoding process by most Iranian viewers, government officials can have as much difficulty in decoding hidden meanings in films as anyone. Giving a permit that can be challenged by another committee is clearly a dangerous act, and there is some evidence of a deal of risk avoidance of this possibility on the part of committees. An anonymous source told me that when he spoke with one of the authorities in relation to his screening permit (around 2000), the official said of his allegorical film, “We saw a Tarkovsky film in London and were unsure whether it was for or against religion. We also don’t know if your film is for or against religion.” In this particular instance, when the reformists were at the peak of their power, the committee took the risk of giving the permit. But it is easy to imagine the safer decision to withhold the permit being granted, and for this safer decision to be the decision-making norm.

Changing political imperatives can also change the fate of a film. There is the earlier, very famous case of Bashu the Little Stranger (1987). Bahram Beyza’i’s first two features were banned. Ostensibly Bashu, his third film, about a young boy who loses his family in the war and flees from the south of the country to the north, where he is taken in by a childless couple, was destined for the same fate. However, this classic of Iranian cinema gained a screening permit after the cessation of the Iran-Iraq War because the theme, under changed circumstances, was suddenly considered appropriate (Bahram Beyza’i Film Director).

Figure 1.1 Actress Fatimeh Motamed Ariya with Adnan Afravian, the titular lead of Bashu the Little Stranger (1987) in his hometown of Ahvaz, February 2015.

Earlier I mentioned Manijeh Hekmat’s first feature, Women’s Prison (2002). This controversial, taboo-breaking film, produced largely through her own production company, “depicts the lives of Iran’s lost generation in the two decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, using the claustrophobic life of women behind bars as a metaphor for the entire society” (Beglari). After the initial problems mentioned earlier, her film became a political football. The reformists pushed for its release as part of their struggle with the conservative judiciary (Zeydabadi-Nejad 45), and the film was ultimately released domestically with cuts but screened uncut internationally (Atebba’i Interview). By contrast, Panahi had the opposite experience with the banning of The Circle, from 2000, two years earlier, for which he had received a screening permit. Seifollah Dad, then the reformist Deputy Minister, has subsequently claimed that he was forced to revoke the permit for The Circle in order to avoid political problems in the aftermath of Mohajerani’s resignation (Zeydabadi-Nejad 52).

Naficy has noted another important factor that marks the filmmaking process – what he describes (and repeatedly demonstrates) as “cronyism based on Islamicate values and kinship” (Social History 3: 121). Naficy has also expressed this concept of cronyism in another way. He notes that the pre-Islamic duality that became overlaid with Islamic values has been enlisted by the regime in the form of a duality applied to artists – “insider” (khodi), those who are trusted by the government and “outsider” (gharibeh), those who are not (Social History 3: 9). Naficy quotes a published letter from Kiarostami where he discusses the government’s “own filmmakers (insiders) and independent filmmakers (outsiders) (Social History 4: 250). This concept, which Esfandiery and Zeydabadi-Nejad also use, is one with which I am only too familiar from everyday parlance with filmmakers who, when asked why a permit was refused, routinely respond simply that they are “outsiders”.

Conversely an anonymous source wrote to me of a trilogy featuring the clergy made between 2001 and 2010 (discussed later), “No wonder the producer of Copper & Gold had also produced The Lizard and Under the Moon Light. He is the one who could easily cross all the so called regime’s redlines and this could not happen unless you have a green light from the higher layers.” That light undoubtedly turned green because the producer was Manouchehr Mohammadi, a former director of supervision on filmmaking in the MCIG (1997–2000). Kamal Tabrizi, director of both the controversial The Lizard and one of the most revered Sacred Defence films, Leily is with me, claims openly his connections as a basis for trust, what others might consider cronyism (Zeydabadi-Nejad 96). Girls (Qasem Jafari, 2009) contains a suicide, a taboo subject, and Parisa Shams, the scriptwriter, told me that getting funding was very difficult for this film, but ultimately it was made, released, and screened. Moreover, it screened in a prominent position, highlighted by an accompanying panel discussion in Roshd, a very conservative film festival. Others routinely refer to the director as an “insider”.

This sort of insider/outsider logic possibly represents a workable, pragmatic solution to an otherwise highly individualised, case-by-case system of filmmaking regulation that would otherwise be ‘clogged up’ with too much uncertainty to be sustainable in film production. It can also perhaps be understood as the result of the situation I described earlier in relation to Jafar Panahi – “Sometimes the script you shoot is not the script you submitted.”

Sometimes ‘trust’ is a more appropriate word for the process. Several veteran women filmmakers gave explanations of the process of getting projects up with bureaucrats, who suggested connections and trust as major factors. They surely helped Fereshteh Taerpour when making the controversial Facing Mirrors (2011), the first fictional film about transgender issues, and Pouran Derakhshandeh, whom I interviewed whilst she was in pre-production for Hush! Girls Don’t Scream (2013), dealing with paedophilia (Interviews). These films, directed or produced by women in Ahmadinejad’s second term, suggested that there was perhaps a different approach by women, one possibly worth investigating.

Figure 1.2 Producer Fereshteh Taerpour with cast, crew and IFFA co-director and author at a reception in Tehran on 14 February 2013 to present the IFFA Audience Award to Facing Mirrors.

Much earlier Mohsen Makhmalbaf discussed the insider/outsider issue in yet another way:

I don’t believe that one should see the authorities as black and white. One cannot say that every official in this regime is bad and their opponents are all good. In cinema sometimes the person in charge was strict and his deputy was sympathetic and vice versa. We always found loopholes which we went through like water in a crack.

(Zeydabadi-Nejad 48)

In summary, “cronyism” and “kind dictators” (as Showqi described the early management of Farabi Cinema Foundation) can be seen as different perspectives on what many filmmakers described to me as “contacts”, “compromise”, and “knowing the [shifting] boundaries” in a fluid governance system. Conversely, many (clearly unnameable) writers and directors in interviews with me between 2010 and 2012 claimed that they were ‘outsiders’ and this status alone was enough to have their permits rejected, without serious consideration being given to the project.

In the late 1990s Dad had attempted to introduce legislation to decrease ambiguity and make the system less dependent on individuals in office. Filmmakers voiced concern about his attempt, and reformist MP (and filmmaker) Behruz Afkhami even opposed it in parliament. He believed that their chances were better, if more complicated, with negotiation with censors under the current laws rather than with the judiciary (Zeydabadi-Nejad 51). It is of note in relation to this ambiguity that of the many filmmakers I have talked with over the years, few if any have even read the regulations, confirming that they are perceived as open to discussion rather than legal interpretation.

Between 2002 and 2008, I saw around fifteen films annually from the selection on offer for viewing by international guests at Fajr. As a group they differed significantly from what would end up at international festivals. My own observation, from watching this limited selection, was that in any given year there seemed to be specific social issues themes that had not previously been dealt with and might not recur thereafter, suggesting to me that funding and subject matter might be connected. In my first year, 2002, ‘temporary marriage’ was a prevalent theme across a number of films. I have asked several Farabi officials about a possible connection between funding and content, and all denied it, although one official conceded that he had previously been asked this question by another foreign guest. A film industry insider suggested that the connection was more likely the result of filmmakers responding to topical issues raised by the government, thus anticipating and seeking their production support through their selection of such issues. It would also maximise the likelihood of requisite permits. I proceeded to take this line of questioning with filmmakers. Although this is a delicate question, I was satisfied that this was indeed sometimes the case. Perhaps the most extreme example points to the reason for the continuing interest in the Sacred Defence genre from some filmmakers. In 2014 a young filmmaker surprised me with the topic of his new (never realised...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Making “constructive” films: generic themes and modulations
• 2 Iranian cinema means the middle classes
• 3 New Iranian cinema and the international festivals
• 4 Film festivals and festival films: an Iranian perspective
• 5 Cinema is a weapon: combatting the soft war
• 6 Culture is not a form of entertainment
• Conclusion: our art will remain the same
• Bibliography
• Index