Iranian cinema: Vindication, freedom and guerrilla filmmaking

Salar Abdoh writes a prescient piece on Iranian cinema for Words Without Borders. Some gems include:

…being Iranian today means, among other things, being associated with what the President of the United States has called the Axis of Evil. Evil suggests barbarity. So each time an Iranian film wins an award, each time a reviewer calls Iranian cinema “vibrant” and Iranian society “intellectually vital,” one feels vindicated. “We are not barbarians!” is that cry across continents that forces others to listen and take note.

For her first feature film, director Manijeh Hekmat managed to convince Iranian government authorities to allow her access to a real women’s prison, where her actresses literally lived and worked alongside actual female prisoners. Women’s Prison brings to the surface all the incongruities of Iranian society by the very fact of its having been allowed to be made at all, confronting viewers, yet again, with supposedly unthinkable subjects for the Islamic Republic: prostitution, drug addiction, suicide and rape.

and

…cinema-loving peasants who rode donkeys or each other’s backs when they needed to shoot down-angle scenes, the people of Khosro village churned out one amateur film after another, year after year, for their own consumption–until the authorities found out about it and arrested the entire crew for not having permission to shoot movies.

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• cinema
• culture
• film
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• iran