6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Cinema verité?
After intellectuals and journalists, film-makers are now the latest victims of Iran's factional power struggle, Azadeh Moaveni reports from Tehran
When director Tahmineh Milani had the screenplay for her new film The Hidden Half approved by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, she understandably assumed both she and her film were safe from Iran's high- strung religious authorities. When the film won the award for best screenplay at the Culture Ministry's Fajr Film Festival earlier this year, that impression was confirmed.
Such approval and recognition explains why the director herself, the minister of culture, and even President Mohamed Khatami were taken back when a Tehran Revolutionary Court, which tries cases impacting on national security, summoned and detained Milani last week for seven days, on charges of "supporting counter-revolutionary groups" in her work. Milani was released on Sunday pending trial.
If such judicial measures continue, "the film industry will stop producing, and our cinema will meet the same fate the press has," warned MP Davood Salimany, a member of the parliament's culture committee.
Until recently, Iran's factional power struggle has claimed journalists, activists, and intellectuals as its victims, leaving the arts world largely untouched. But Milani's arrest has alarmed artists and film-makers. They fear their work will be the next battleground on which judicial hard-liners will wage their assault against what they consider corrupting Western cultural influences -- a perception that broadly encompasses any textual, visual, or verbal expression that criticises the Islamic establishment. Minister of Culture Ahmed Masjed-Jamei reassured the film industry, in a response to a letter from the House of Cinema, an Iranian film- makers' association, that he supported their right to work in an environment that secures their legal and civil rights.
But with a fundamentalist judiciary and a reform-minded Culture Ministry perpetually locking-horns, film-makers increasingly feel that legal accountability has ceased to exist; even self-censorship, they believe, no longer buys invulnerability from prosecution. President Mohamed Khatami told a press conference this week that a director should not be held responsible, in the event of censorial misjudgment by the Culture Ministry. "We shouldn't act in a way that creates insecurity in the arts community," he said.
Curiously, the film that is threatening the nation's security is still playing in Tehran. Cinema Eram on Jomhuri Street (Revolution Street) proudly displays The Hidden Half on its marquee, and neither the ticket sellers nor most of the film's audience have any idea that the director sat behind bars for a week.
The most direct critique Iran has yet seen of the excesses following the 1979 Revolution, covering the purging of secular activists, the tyrannical imposition of Islamic codes, the cultural cleansing of universities, The Hidden Half traces the love affair between a young leftist revolutionary and a seasoned magazine editor. It is a provocative, pioneering first-step for an Iran that has for over two decades steadfastly refused to acknowledge the excesses of its revolution.
In an interview published the same week of her arrest, Milani said the film depicted a reality she had lived, bluntly describing how the revolution had silenced a generation of political activists through executions and lifetime imprisonment, including many of her personal friends. In Iran, such comments can be tantamount to a political crime, and the interview contained many such remarks that will undoubtedly implicate Milani before the revolutionary court. The newspaper Hambategi, which published the interview, has since apologised in its pages for quoting the director off- the-record.
Milani is not the first prominent director to run afoul of hard-liners, the exigencies of the job, foreign travel and depicting aspects of real life on the screen, inevitably provoke fundamentalists. When prominent director Abbas Kiorastami returned from Cannes the year he produced ATaste of Cherry, hard-liners were waiting at the arrival hall to take him to task for kissing a woman on the cheeks at the festival.
Kiarostami was fortunately rescued -- Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, had her Mercedes waiting for him on the runway. Such powerful establishment connections and much circumspection account for the renaissance in Iranian cinema.
But to date, no prominent film-maker has stepped forward to offer even muted support of Milani, save one. "Without even knowing the details, simply in defence of freedom of expression and the rights of artists, today we are all responsible for defending this director and condemning her arrest," said Massoud Jaffari- Jozari. "If we do not critisize now, then tomorrow, when they come for us, perhaps none of us will be left."
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