Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf with his youngest daughter. A former supporter
of the Islamic regime, his views have been transformed by the cinema.
To know more
World Production Rank 1999: 13
Local films’ share of domestic box-office 1998: 95%
Number of films produced
Population (millions)
1988: 51.9
1998: 65.8
Number of screens
1988: 279
1998: 285
Data for cinema admissions and total film production investment are not available.
Source: Screen Digest
(contact: David.Hancock@
screendigest.com).
and UNESCO
Institute of statistics. |
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Cinema was authorized by the Islamic
Republic for propaganda purposes, but a new generation of directors is offering the
world a very different image of Iran
 In Iran, cinema did not become legitimate (in the eyes of
believers) until the revolution of February 1979. Before that political upheaval,
which stemmed from widespread dissatisfaction with the Shah’s regime and resulted
in an “Islamic Republic” headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the seventh art had
drawn thundering condemnation from the clergy.
Movies first appeared in Iran at the start of the twentieth century, and Muslim clerics
voiced their opposition to the new art form as soon as the first theatres opened
in Tehran in 1904. Several cinemas were burned down, with sometimes tragic consequences:
in August 1978, 400 people lost their lives at the Rex in the city of Abadan. Mullahs
believed the movie theatre to be a symbol of the godless West and a competitor to
the mosque, thus making it a direct threat to their power. Furthermore, movies were
considered blasphemous because they featured images of women without veils and, later,
scenes of dancing accompanied by music.
Fanatical believers could not tolerate the iconographical portrayal of humans: God
alone is the “Creator” and the “Craftsman” of living beings. Mosque decorations,
especially in Iran, contain no figurative representations, and for centuries the
power of words dominated Iranian society. Without any tradition of visual artistic
expression (with the exception of miniatures in the 14th and 15th centuries), “imaginative”
representation became the domain of writers and, above all, poets.
Between 1930 and 1979, approximately 1,100 feature films were shown in 420 theatres,
but not one of them met with the ayatollahs’ approval. Rigidly Muslim parents even
beat their children for going to the movies. But when Khomeini took power, a strange
reversal occurred. Overnight, the cinema became of interest to everybody, including
the clerics. As in other areas, the new regime took control of everything. It confiscated
images and made its own visual style omnipresent on television, in newspapers, on
walls and in movie theatres. The blessed and purified seventh art had won its legitimacy,
though foreign cinema, which flies in the face of Islamic values, was banned. As
a result, the national film industry had no competitors on Iranian soil.
During his exile in France, Ayatollah Khomeini had become aware of the image’s role
as an effective political propaganda tool. Back in Tehran, he saw Dariush Mehrjui’s
film The Cow (1969) on television. The film, with a style close to realism, focuses
on the troubled lives of impoverished farmers in a remote village, where one character
identifies with his dead cow, the only property he owns. This movie inspired the
religious leader to make a speech on the educational role of film.
Setting the wheels of dissent
in motion
As early as the first year of the revolution,
all parts of the state worked hard to create an “Islamic cinema” that would move
in “the right direction.” At the very same time, a rival style of cinema, drawing
on the tradition of high-quality filmmaking from before 1979, was also born. A few
filmmakers managed to create a language that skirted around the relentless censorship,
drawing inspiration from everyday life (through a fusion between documentary and
fiction) and from Persian poetry. The freshness and innocence of their films struck
a chord with the public. The film directors also learned to play one state body against
another, especially as the various appoined officials changed position frequently.
The new cinema’s leading representative, Abbas Kiarostami, who also co-founded the
filmmaking department at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children
and Young Adults in 1969, uses his camera to challenge Khomeini’s cinematic precepts.
As Iran and Iraq braced for a particularly murderous war (1980-1988), the new regime,
after just a few months of nascent democracy, took a much harder line. In this grim
context, Abbas Kiarostami made at the end of 1979 Alternative 1, Alternative 2, an
indictment of informers that lays bare the ineptitude of various social classes,
including the clergy. The movie was banned and never approved for release. But Kiarostami,
who says that he is a secular director, had set the wheels in motion of a form of
filmmaking that would prove a formidable adversary to the regime.
Kiarostami’s films criticized the mullahs’ hold over society. In Homework (1990),
he attacked the brainwashing of children. Then, with Taste of Cherry (1997), he focused
on suicide, which is against Islamic law, and whose causes must be sought in people’s
despair over Iran’s rigid social structures. Another barrier fell with The Wind Will
Carry Us (1999), which casts doubt on the existence of an after-life.
Kiarostami is not the only director to have challenged Iranian society. In Bashu,
The Little Stranger (1987), Bahram Beyzaï condemned the terrible consequences
of the holy war against Iraq. So did Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Marriage of the Blessed
(1989). Amir Naderi focused on the authorities’ attitude towards soldiers missing-in-action
at the beginning of the war, which he gave an alternative account of in the as yet
unreleased Search 2. With The Runner (1985), Naderi became the first director since
the revolution to give leading parts to children, who went on to become some of Iran’s
most popular movie “actors”.
This is noteworthy because Iran is undergoing a demographic boom. The population
has nearly doubled in the past 20 years, and almost half of all Iranians are under
20. Film directors noticed that the authorities were failing to take these figures
seriously, and—drawing on the saying that words of truth come from the mouths of
babes—they cast children to explore facets of everyday life.
From a whimsical cinematic style partly based on Egyptian and Indian B-movies, Iranian
films made the transition to something between “Italian neo-realism” and “French
new wave,” shattering taboos and washing Iran’s dirty laundry in public. Worst of
all in the mullahs’ eyes, this new cinema captured the imagination and the talent
of the regime’s apologists. The most stunning example of this is Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
A pure product of the protests that marked the end of the Shah’s rule, he spent four
years in jail before being released in 1979. He was fully committed to the new regime
and directed the Islamic Artistic Theatre Centre, a propaganda organization, before
gradually moving towards cinema. With the complete trust of the authorities, he then
directed The Peddler (1987), which caused a sensation by openly criticizing the regime
and denouncing the “lies of the mosque.” When journalists asked him, “Makhmalbaf,
what have you become? Are you stepping out of line?” he replied, “I’ve discovered
cinema, and it has changed the way I look at the world.”
On a trip to Europe, Makhmalbaf was so deeply moved by Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire
that he made blasphemous remarks on his return to Iran. “If God must send a new prophet,
his name will be Wim Wenders,” he declared. He then made a film challenging the dogma
of Islamic society, Time of Love (1990), about an affair between a married woman
and her lover. Contrary to all expectations, the movie was shown at the Tehran film
festival the same year, where it drew huge crowds in just a few screenings (though
it was not cleared for general release). That event, in part, cost Makhmalbaf his
position at the Ministry of Culture, which at the time was headed by none other than
the current president, Mohammad Khatami.
The 1990s marked a turning point. The West was surprised to discover a different
Iran at film festivals, with Iranian movies addressing themes such as friendship,
tolerance and togetherness. A time of honours and awards had begun. “Once, Iran exported
oil, rugs and pistachios. Now it can add movies to the list. Iran exports its culture,
which is a good thing,” said Kiarostami, who won the 1997 Golden Palm at Cannes for
Taste of Cherry. In 2000, three Iranian filmmakers won prizes at Cannes, including
Makhmalbaf’s 20-year-old daughter, Samira, the youngest award-winner in the festival’s
history, for Blackboards. Bahman Ghobadi, meanwhile, won the Golden Camera award
for A Time for Drunken Horses and Hassan Yektapanah for Djomeh.
Iran is a veritable breeding ground for fresh cinematic talent. Today, around 20
gifted directors, including Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Jalili, Mehrjui, Beyzaï,
Forozesh, Naderi and Panahi, make 15 per cent of the 60 films that the country produces
each year. The limits of this cinema, which is shattering the last taboos, are still
unknown.
For the first time, a feature film, The Circle, which reaped the Golden Lion at the
2000 Venice Film Festival, deals with prostitution, a topic that had previously been
totally off-limits in the Islamic republic. Forty-year-old Jafar Panahi, who had
already won the Golden Camera award at Cannes in 1995 for The White Balloon, made
this outstanding film without even submitting the script to Iran’s censorship committee.
A willingness to test the regime’s limits can also be witnessed among writers and
journalists, some of whom were killed or imprisoned in 1999. Arrests have continued
since the beginning of the year.
Female directors have encountered even more hurdles, but they too have found a place
behind the camera in making films about the condition of women. For example, Rakhshan
Banni-Etemad, Tahminé Milani and a dozen or so others are making names for
themselves in Iran’s “macho-Islamic” society. Young Iranian exiles who studied in
the West are also going back home, bringing a different vision of Iran with them.
For example Babak Payami, who directed the remarkable A Day More, a film about love,
lived in Canada.
Iran has adopted the modern imagery coined by films. Whether in documentary or fiction,
Iranian cinema has liberated itself and become part of people’s day-to-day lives.
All Iranians are now spellbound by images, “whether it is a just image or just an
image,” to borrow the expression of French director Jean-Luc Godard.
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