Iran's Cinema of Resistance

Abstract

Iran's Cinema of Resistance Hanna Khosravi (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Nasrin Sotoudeh in a still from Jafar Panahi's Taxi (International Federation for Human Rights/Flickr) [End Page 6] About halfway through Jafar Panahi's Taxi (2015), the Iranian filmmaker picks up his young niece, Hana, from her elementary school. Hana has just been tasked with producing a film for class, and she is eager to seek her uncle's guidance. Who better to ask than an internationally renowned writer and director? Hana tells Panahi that her school, which is under the jurisdiction of the Islamic regime's so-called morality police, has banned what the government refers to as "sordid realism" in any of the student productions. The legal term for this censored cinematic art form is translated from the Farsi (phonetically anglicized as seeyah namaee), which literally means "representing something darkly." Hana tells Panahi that her teacher instructed the students to "show what is real, but not what is real real. Then [the teacher] said if reality is dark and unpleasant, not to show it. . . . They don't want to show it, but they do it themselves." She pauses, seemingly unaware of the harrowing truth that she has just laid bare, then adds, "Whatever. I don't get it." The scene's striking dialogue uses the neorealist motif of framing social and political inquiries through the innocent, prying eyes of a child. Panahi—a dissident, a political prisoner, an artist—has dedicated his life to an illicit art form. Like many of Iran's dissident filmmakers, Panahi centers much of his work around the stories of women. Consider the film that initiated his ongoing struggle against the country's authoritarian regime: The Circle (2000), which was groundbreaking in its bleak, unvarnished depiction of the government's crushing oppression of women. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review, "The film is profoundly dangerous to the status quo in Iran because it asks us to identify with the plight of women who have done nothing wrong except to be female." Like Taxi, The Circle is about the poetics of the everyday. It is an act of unveiling, revealing how Iranian women pursue their own safety and survival. Following his participation in the 2009 Green Movement, Panahi was arrested and convicted of creating "anti-government propaganda." During a three-month stint in Evin Prison—commonly known as Evin University because of the number of intellectuals, journalists, students, and artists who have been imprisoned there—Panahi went on a hunger strike that garnered attention from filmmakers, artists, and activists around the world. Following his release, the government banned Panahi from directing or releasing films for twenty years. Panahi's 2011 documentary chronicling his life under house arrest, aptly titled This Is Not a Film, was smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a flash drive concealed within a birthday cake. Recently the repression of artists has gotten worse. Last May, more than a dozen documentary filmmakers were arrested or had their homes raided when [End Page 7] the ultraconservative administration of President Ebrahim Raisi conducted the most severe crackdown on artistic freedom of expression that Iran had seen in many years. Two months later, Panahi was arrested after going to a prosecutor's office in Tehran to pursue answers regarding the imprisonment of his friend Mohammad Rasoulof, who was arrested in July after posting a statement on social media urging the regime's security forces to lay down their weapons against anti-government protesters in Iran's Khuzestan province. Like Panahi's Taxi, Rasoulof's 2020 film There Is No Evil, which tells four interwoven stories of Iranians whose lives have been affected by the systemic corruption and injustice of the country's capital punishment laws, won the prestigious Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Also like Panahi, Rasoulof was banned from leaving the country and was unable to attend the festival and receive his prize. On July 19, Panahi, too, was sentenced to six years in Evin Prison. Since September, thousands of Iranians have been imprisoned in Evin for participating in the uprising that has convulsed Iran and much of the Kurdistan region...