TTHIS ISSUEHIS ISSUE IIRANIAN CINEMA RANIAN CINEMA · 2020. 11. 24. · Volume 15 - Number 2...

Volume 15 - Number 2

February – March 2019£4

THIS ISSUETHIS ISSUE:: IRANIAN CINEMA IRANIAN CINEMA ●● Indian camera, Iranian heart Indian camera, Iranian heart ●● The The literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New Wave literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New Wave ● ● Dystopic Tehran in ‘Film Farsi’ popular Dystopic Tehran in ‘Film Farsi’ popular cinema cinema ●● Parviz Sayyad: socio-political commentator dressed as village fool Parviz Sayyad: socio-political commentator dressed as village fool ●● The noir world The noir world of Masud Kimiai of Masud Kimiai ● ● The resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinema The resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinema ● ● Asghar Farhadi’s Asghar Farhadi’s cinema cinema ● ● New diasporic visions of Iran New diasporic visions of Iran ● ● PLUSPLUS Reviews and events in LondonReviews and events in London

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Volume 15 – Number 2February–March 2019

Sam Beklik, The Eye. Specially designed for the 'Iranian Cinema' issue of The Middle East in Londonwww.sambeklik.com

Volume 15 - Number 2

February – March 2019£4

THIS ISSUETHIS ISSUE:: IRANIAN CINEMA IRANIAN CINEMA ●● Indian camera, Iranian heart Indian camera, Iranian heart ●● The The literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New Wave literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New Wave ● ● Dystopic Tehran in ‘Film-Farsi’ popular Dystopic Tehran in ‘Film-Farsi’ popular cinema cinema ●● Parviz Sayyad: socio-political commentator dressed as village fool Parviz Sayyad: socio-political commentator dressed as village fool ●● The noir world The noir world of Masud Kimiai of Masud Kimiai ● ● The resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinema The resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinema ● ● Asghar Farhadi’s Asghar Farhadi’s cinema cinema ● ● New diasporic visions of Iran New diasporic visions of Iran ● ● PLUSPLUS Reviews and events in LondonReviews and events in London

February – March 2019 The Middle East in London 3

LMEI Board of Trustees

Baroness Valerie Amos (Chair)Director, SOAS

Dr Orkideh Behrouzan, SOAS

Professor Stephen Hopgood, SOAS

Dr Lina Khatib, Chatham House

Dr Dina Matar, SOAS

Dr Hanan MorsyAfrican Development Bank

Professor Scott Redford, SOAS

Mr James Watt, CBRL

LMEI Advisory Council

Lady Barbara Judge (Chair)

Professor Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem

H E Khalid Al-Duwaisan GVCOAmbassador, Embassy of the State of Kuwait

Mrs Haifa Al KaylaniArab International Women’s Forum

Dr Khalid Bin Mohammed Al KhalifaPresident, University College of Bahrain

Professor Tony AllanKing’s College and SOAS

Dr Alanoud AlsharekhSenior Fellow for Regional Politics, IISS

Mr Farad AzimaNetScientifi c Plc

Dr Noel BrehonyMENAS Associates Ltd.

Professor Magdy Ishak HannaBritish Egyptian Society

HE Mr Rami MortadaAmbassador, Embassy of Lebanon

4 EDITORIAL

5INSIGHTIndian camera, Iranian heartRanjita Ganesan

7IRANIAN CINEMATh e literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New WaveSaeed Talajooy

9Cinema of urban crisis: dystopic Tehran in ‘Film Farsi’ popular cinemaGolbarg Rekabtalaei

11Parviz Sayyad: socio-political commentator dressed as village foolRoya Arab

13Th e noir world of Masud KimiaiParviz Jahed

15Damascus Time: the resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ CinemaKaveh Abbasian

17Asghar Farhadi’s cinema: a family torn apartAsal Bagheri

19Imagining homeland from a distance: new diasporic visions of IranSaeed Zeydabadi-Nejad

REVIEWSFILMS21‘Poets of Life’ & ‘Puzzleys’, part of the Karestan seriesTaraneh Dadar

22BOOKS IN BRIEF

24IN MEMORIAMRoger Owen (1935-2018)Sami Zubaida

25EVENTS IN LONDON

Contents

4 The Middle East in London February – March 2019

EDITORIALEDITORIAL

Photograph taken on 24 November 2018 at SOAS’s Centre for Iranian Studies screening of Karestan documentaries. From left to right: Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, Roya Arab, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad,

Shirin Barghnavard and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

Iranian cinema’s prominence at international fi lm festivals over the last three decades has raised interest and questions in equal measure. Th e success has been paradoxical on many levels, not least because the production of such a high volume of quality fi lms has taken place under a strong ideological state that requires overcoming a myriad of religio-political restrictions.

Th e international renown and academic interest in festival fi lms has come at the expense of research and viewing of the larger body of Iranian cinematic output from lesser known auteurs, as well as mainstream and diasporic varieties. In this issue, authors with wide-ranging interests –fi lmmakers, academics and critics – assess an assortment of Iranian fi lmmakers, cinematic genres and themes.

We begin this issue with Ranjita Ganesan’s exploration of the fi lmmaking career of Abdolhossein Sepanta, maker of the fi rst Iranian ‘talkie’ – which was made in India – with Parsi fi lmmaker Ardeshir Irani. Ganesan describes the Zoroastrian

connections and common cultural interests between early Iranian and Indian fi lmmaking traditions.

Saeed Talajooy provides an overview of the aesthetics and thematic inspirations that Persian literature provided for Iranian ‘new wave’ fi lmmakers before the 1979 Revolution.

Golbarg Rekabtalaei takes a new lens to the denigrated ‘Film Farsi’ – mainstream cinema before the Revolution – which, until recently, has attracted little academic interest. She shows how Film Farsi engaged with socio-cultural anxieties in urban life under the Pahlavis.

Roya Arab reviews the works of Parviz Sayyad and asks if the success of Samad, his iconic comic character, has overshadowed his extensive contribution to Iranian cinema as a writer, director, actor and producer.

Parviz Jahed explores the world of Persian Film Noir – specifi cally, the works of Masud Kimiai, the most prolifi c creator of the genre in Iran. He explores the recurring themes of criminality, violence

and heroism in Kimiai’s homosocial fi lms. Kaveh Abbasian discusses the aesthetic

aspirations of the so-called ‘Sacred Defence’ fi lms, which have been a tool for propagating the Islamic Republic’s ideology since their inception.

Asal Bagheri examines Asghar Farhadi’s latest fi lm Everybody Knows (2018) and highlights the fi lmmaker’s use of recurring themes and narrative techniques even beyond the borders of Iran.

Mirroring Ganesan’s focus on fi lms made by Iranians abroad, Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad brings the issue full circle by exploring recent trends among diasporic Iranian fi lmmakers of narratives set in fi ctionalised Iranian locations. He explores why and how homeland has been imagined in these fi lms.

Th e issue is brought to a close with Taraneh Dadar’s review of the Karestan fi lm project, which sheds light on a fascinating series of documentaries (an infl uential and understudied cinematic genre), two of which recently featured at a Centre for Iranian Studies event at SOAS.

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, SOAS & Roya Arab, City, University of London

Dear ReaderDear Reader


Every day for some months in 1935, Abdolhossein Sepanta dutifully made the dull commute from Bandra to Andheri in Bombay. By this time the fi nancial capital of India and home of Indian cinema were familiar to Sepanta, a young poet and journalist from Tehran who attended theatre school in his youth. He had studied and worked in India for a number of years, taking on assignments as a writer and translator. He had also scripted and made three of the earliest Persian-language sound fi lms

(‘talkies’) in collaboration with a studio in Bombay. Th e fi rst of these had been Dokhtar-e Lor (Lor Girl, 1933), a costume drama featuring gypsies, bandits and government offi cials.

Th ose daily train journeys in 1935 marked a departure of sorts, as Sepanta had just fallen out with his initial collaborator Ardeshir Irani of the Imperial Films Company, the pioneer of Indian talkies. So he was travelling instead to the leafy studios of a rival production house, which had agreed to back his next

passion project. Released in both Iran and India, his fi lms are a fascinating early example of co-productions in the East. His experiences are also indicative of the remarkable diffi culties of making cinema in those years.

Even if cut short, Sepanta’s time with Imperial Films was signifi cant. Originally having arrived in India in 1927 with a desire to understand the Zoroastrian history of Iran, he wrote for publications of the Bombay-based Iran League – an organisation that aimed to keep ties alive between Indian Zoroastrians and their old land Iran. Sepanta was introduced to the prolifi c producer Irani in 1932, who had just produced an Urdu fi lm Daku ki

Released in both Iran and India, Abdolhossein Sepanta’s fi lms are a fascinating early example of co-productions in the East

Indian camera, Indian camera, Iranian heartIranian heart

Ranjita Ganesan provides an account of the early collaborative talkies of Abdolhossein Sepanta from 1933 to 1937

Golnar (Roohangiz Saminejad) wrings her hands nervously while in the custody of the bandit Gholi Khan. Still taken from Abdolhossein Sepanta’s Lor Girl

INSIGHTINSIGHT


Ladki. ‘Seeing the fi lm, plus the friendship between my employer (Dinshah Irani) and Ardeshir Irani gave me the perfect opportunity to interest Ardeshir in producing a fi lm in Persian language’ Sepanta is quoted as having written in his memoirs.

An ambitious Ardeshir Irani (possibly) did not need much convincing. He had raced against more established competitors to make the fi rst Indian talkie Alam Ara in 1931 – exporting fi lms to Iran would be another feather in his pheta. Episodes from the Persian epic Shahnameh as well as Islamic fantasy tales from One Th ousand and One Nights were already part of the public imagination in Bombay, given their adaptation by the popular Parsi theatre. When motion pictures emerged, a number of these became recurring themes in cinema too; among them Shirin va Farhad and Leili va Majnun. So the two set off making familiar yet exotic fi lms for both the Iranian and Indian markets.

Irani, described by Sepanta as an excellent fi lm editor, off ered him technical advice, along with books on script writing and directing. Directed by Irani, Sepanta wrote and played the lead in Lor Girl. Together, they persuaded Roohangiz Saminejad, wife of an Iranian staff driver at Imperial Films, to take on the female lead during a time when few women were willing to appear on screen. Her lilting Kermani accent, while playing a Lorestani character, had to be explained in a plot point; nevertheless it appealed to audiences and some even mimicked her lines.

As the fi rst ever Persian talkie, Sepanta felt it should stir patriotism among viewers. He conceived of a hero Jafar, a government agent investigating bandits who, it is implied, thrived during the Qajar era. His search leads him to a coff ee house where he meets and falls in love with a dancer, Golnar. Golnar is a heroine ahead of her time: she thwarts unwanted advances of men, fl irts proactively with Jafar and pulls off daring escapes and rescues. Th e two set off together to fi nd the chief bandit Gholi Khan’s hideout and succeed in killing him. Fearing for their lives, they sail to Bombay port and later, having learnt of a secure and prosperous Iran under Pahlavi rule, return to Iran. Th e fi lm’s alternative title ‘Iran of yesterday and Iran of today’ speaks directly to its underlying message of advancement under Reza Shah.

Lor Girl is the only Sepanta fi lm to have survived. It featured luminous costumes, a two-minute dance sequence, a fl ashback, several songs and gun-battles, all contributing to its success. Khuzestan had been recreated in Chembur, then a verdant, far-fl ung part of Bombay. When the couple fl ees to India, there are glimpses of the Gateway of India, Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and Rajabai Clock Tower. Despite its talkie credentials, intertitles were inserted to inform of time lapses and plot details. Following the fi lm’s enthusiastic reception – the applause in Cinema Mayak was so loud one movie critic felt ‘the fl oor of the theatre tremble’ – Irani handed over direction to Sepanta for the next releases, Ferdowsi (1934) and Shirin va Farhad (1934).

By now, the young writer had brought in Fakhri Vaziri from Iran, who worked in an acting school, and gave her a break on screen as Shirin. To meet and convince Vaziri’s parents, he even brought along his own mother, wife and son. Th e partnership with Irani withered aft er Sepanta was disappointed with his share in the returns; he joined other Indian studios to direct his next costume dramas. Vaziri accompanied the director on the humid train commutes to fi lm Cheshman-e Siah (Black Eyes) with Shree Krishna Films, which released it in 1936. Based on Nader Shah’s invasion of India, this fi lm was perhaps Sepanta’s most publicised, especially aimed at India’s

Parsi viewers as a special release for the kadmi New Year holiday.

Th e director’s most positive experience was in Bengal, telling the love story Leyli and Majnun (1937) with the East India Film Company, which had access to advanced cameras and sound equipment. Th rough detailed meetings with the studio, he learnt about pre-production. Vaziri co-starred in this fi lm too, which was reported by the Times of India to have an ‘Oriental atmosphere’ and ‘probably the best Persian talkie made in India or Iran.’ On returning to Iran soon thereaft er, his fi lmmaking hopes suff ered as distributors tried to purchase the fi lms cheaply, and government support for cinema was not forthcoming. Instead, he resumed journalism and eventually made home movies with an 8mm camera. His cinematic contributions are not forgotten; acknowledged as father of Iranian sound fi lms, his Lor Girl is a subject of academic and general interest, and the Iranian Film Festival in San Francisco (est. 2007) is titled Sepanta Awards.

Th e story of Sepanta’s eff orts between 1933 and 1937 is, importantly, the story of how two cultures enriched each other. It is unfortunate that despite popular release in Iran and India, only one of the fi ve fi lms remains available for viewing. Still, as Irani’s Alam Ara appears to be lost forever, Lor Girl preserves the legacy of two important artists and is a thing to be cherished.

His cinematic contributions are not forgotten; Sepanta is acknowledged as father of Iranian sound fi lms, his Lor Girl is a subject of academic and general interest and the Iranian

Film Festival in San Francisco is titled Sepanta Awards

Ranjita Ganesan is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes on subjects of culture and the arts for the Indian daily Business Standard and has contributed to outlets including Reuters and Hindustan Times. She recently completed the MA in Iranian Studies at SOAS


Film poster advertising The Cow, directed by Dariush Mehrjui

During the last three decades, the ‘new wave’ fi lms of Iranian cinema, particularly the docudramas and psychosocial fi lms, have found a degree of visibility across the globe and won awards for their aesthetic qualities and thematic probing into contemporary human life. Films by Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beyzai, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi or Asghar Farhadi speak with a fi lmic language understandable to people of diff erent cultures, but the specifi cs of their expression and subtle innuendoes are rooted in a rich tradition of Persian literary, dramatic and visual arts.

Th is article will explore the roots of the artistic expansion of Iranian cinema in the 1960s, while highlighting the contributions of Iranian drama and Persian literature.

Beginning in the early 1850s, drama was the very fi rst Iranian creative form which replaced the image of mythical humanity with depictions of more realistic fi ctional characters engaged with topical, everyday problems. Traditionally, folktales were adapted for puppet and taqlid comedies or even ta’ziyeh passion plays to comment on secular subjects, but the level of socio-political consciousness in Akhundzadeh’s Azari plays (1850-1856) and Tabrizi’s

Persian plays (1873-1874) transcended these indigenous forms and heralded the cultural products of the following decades.

Due to religious prohibitions, the adoption of modern theatre and drama as a form of artistic expression was not straightforward. Nevertheless, hybrid forms evolved with the adoption of Western-style drama, particularly from the 1910s onward, and continued to be important forms of artistic expression and socio-political engagement in Iran. From the 1930s, theatre and fi ction shared their functions as spaces for the production of modern identities with radio, cinema and later television, but Persian literature and drama continued to function as major bastions of experimentation.

Cinema, arrived in Iran in 1900 as a royal hobby due to Mozaff areddin Shah’s (r. 1896-1906) fascination with the idea of the recorded image. While it proved to be very attractive to the public, it was highly controversial to the retrogressive forces that hid behind their fake idea of an unchanging tradition. Th e fi rst documentaries of the period either show the old king in his everyday activities or old Tehran. But, as with many other markers of modernity, the Iranian experience of cinematography

suff ered disruptions: Mohamad Ali Shah (r. 1906-1909), for instance, did not allow Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi (1874-1915), the fi rst Iranian cameraman, to use the royal camera and the chaos of the confl icts that followed the Constitutional Revolution made such ‘luxurious activities’ impossible. Th e next time Tehran was fi lmed was two decades later in 1924, when the fi rst Pahlavi King, Reza Shah (1925-1941), had already begun implementing his plans for authoritative modernity.

Th e history-proper of Iranian cinema, therefore, begins with the Pahlavi era. Th e fi rst feature fi lms of the period

The literary and dramatic The literary and dramatic roots of the Iranian New Waveroots of the Iranian New Wave

By combining elements from Iranian drama and Persian literature, the New Wave marked a turning point in Iranian cinema. Saeed Talajooy explains

Th e foremost infl uential fi gure in this move towards the new wave was Ebrahim Golestan, a prominent Iranian

short-story writer. His documentaries revealed a powerful, poetic vision with a high degree of socio-political, historical

and cultural consciousness, which had until then been only observed in Persian drama and literature

IRANIAN CINEMAIRANIAN CINEMA


Th e best fi lms of the New Wave in the 1970s combined the aesthetics and the major themes of Persian literature and drama with fi lmic elements from various cultures, particularly French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and Japanese art-house cinema

were created by individuals who were motivated by artistic and entrepreneurial aspirations, such as Abdolhossein Septanta. Aft er a period of decline between 1936 and 1954, a new Iranian cinema evolved with the initiative of Esmail Koushan (1917-1981). It was characterised by a commercial spirit that made Iranian cinema economically independent but had negative impacts on its artistic aspirations. Due to its preoccupation with seemingly non-political aspects of life, it also loosened the early links between Iranian cinema and the more progressive forms of artistic production in Iran. From the late 1950s, however, the momentum returned, producing the fi rst prototype of Iranian New Wave.

One of the most infl uential fi gures in this move towards the new wave was Ebrahim Golestan (1922-), a prominent Iranian short-story writer, who began making documentary fi lms in the 1950s. Th ese documentaries – commissioned by British Petroleum – exceeded expectations and from 1960 onward revealed a powerful, poetic vision with a high degree of socio-political, historical and cultural consciousness, which had until then been only observed in Persian drama and literature. Th is poetic vision, which proved instrumental in the later development of the Iranian New Wave, was not the product of Golestan’s individual creativity but the child of his long-standing romantic involvement with Forough Farrokhzad (1934-67), the prominent female Iranian poet of the 1950s and 1960s. Forough’s poetic vision and Golestan’s literary and fi lmmaking skills reshaped their creative output in ways that set the stage for a new momentum in Iranian cinema, which foreshadowed the documentary and feature tendencies of the Iranian New Wave in the following decades. Forough’s documentary fi lm, Khaneh Siah Ast (Th e House is Black, 1963) and Golestan’s fi rst feature fi lm, Khesht va Ayenh (Mudbrick and Mirror, 1965) focus on topics such as gender relations, the margins of society, the meaning of life, the importance of belonging and the juxtaposition of the preoccupations of diff erent classes and set the stage for many New Wave fi lms that followed.

Th e same literary origins can be seen in another prototype of Iranian New Wave, Jalal-e Moqaddam and Farrokh Ghaff ari’s Shab-e Quzi (Th e Night of the Hunchback,

1964). Th e fi lm was a creative adaptation of the story of ‘the tailor, the hunchback, the Jew, the advisor and the Christian’ from One Th ousand and One Nights. It is a story about honesty and justice and emphasises that true justice does not discriminate against individuals due to their religious or class backgrounds. Th e fi lm adds a number of noir elements to turn the narrative into a black comedy set in a contemporary dystopia – the Tehran of the early 1960s – in which people shun their responsibilities and endanger others without considering the consequences of their actions.

Th e most important fi lms of the 1960s, Mowlapour’s realist Showhar-e Ahu Khanom (Ahu’s Husband, 1968) and Mehrjui’s Gav (Th e Cow) shared the same literary and dramatic roots, but what made the latter the most celebrated fi lm of the early years of the Iranian New Wave was primarily the cooperation of an early career fi lmmaker, Dariush Mehrjui (1939), and a young, yet fully-established novelist and playwright, Gholamhossein Sae’di (1936-85). Sae’di’s episodic novel Azadaran-e Bayal (Th e Mourners of Bayal, 1964) – which is made of a series of interrelated stories about the degeneration of village life in Iran – is one of the masterpieces of psychosocial realist-surrealist literature in Iran, and the script that Sae’di himself wrote for the fi lm was a unique piece which echoed his concern with the Kafk aesque metamorphosis

of an individual and, by extension, a nation. Th anks to Sae’di’s experience as a psychiatrist-turned-writer, the story and the fi lm became an artistic commentary on the pitfalls of Iran’s encounter with modernity and the impossibility of emancipation when people are crushed under the burden of ignorance. Th e actors of the fi lm were all theatre actors who had worked with Sa’edi for about a decade. Sa’edi went on to work with Naser Taqvaei (1941-) in Aramesh dar Hozour Digaran (Tranquillity in Presence of Others, 1971) and once more with Mehrjui in Dayereh-ye Mina (Th e Cycle, 1975), which were both among the best fi lms of the early years of the Iranian New Wave.

To conclude, the Iranian New Wave was the child of Iranian drama and literature; its most celebrated works were produced by fi lmmakers who worked with novelists/dramatists or themselves had literary/dramatic backgrounds. Th is is also refl ected in the best fi lms of the New Wave in the 1970s, which were either adaptations or were made by well-established Iranian dramatists such as Bahram Beyzai (1938-) and Arbi Hovhannisyan (1943-) who became fi lmmakers in the early 1970s. Th ese fi lms created a tradition for the Iranian New Wave by combining the aesthetics and the major themes of Persian literature and drama with fi lmic elements from various cultures, particularly French New Wave, Italian Neorealism and Japanese art-house cinema. By 1975 the Iranian New Wave had reached a level of maturity that allowed it to become an independent form refl ecting the many sides of Iranian creativity, and aft er the 1979 Revolution it began to evolve in diff erent directions.

Saeed Talajooy is lecturer in Persian at the University of St Andrews. His research is focussed on the refl ections of the changing patterns of the modalities of Iranian identity in Persian literature and Iranian drama and cinema


Still from Storm in Our City, directed by Samuel Khachikian


Showing scenes of ‘murder, crime, betrayal… grand theft s, street shootings, and horrifying police chases in Tehran’, the anonymous author of a 1968 article in Ferdowsi magazine claimed popular cinema, derogatively referred to as ‘Film Farsi’, had made a monster out of Tehran, similar to the city of ‘Chicago during its gangster era.’ Commonly denigrated as cheap, vulgar and immoral productions and imitative copies of Hollywood, Indian and Egyptian popular cinemas, the pre-revolutionary Iranian popular fi lm industry has

gained little scholarly attention. While grudgingly regarded as part and parcel of a national cinema, socio-cultural critics did not view Film Farsi as an artistic form due to its ‘unrealistic’ mediation and understanding of the world. A closer look at popular fi lms from the 1950s to the 1970s – against the backdrop of national socio-political conditions – however, reveals something of the social attitudes of the time. Film Farsi engaged with the real, in so far as it engaged with the social. One of the ways through which popular cinema tackled extant social concerns was

by attending to urban anxieties arising from modernisation.

Depicting the city and its disintegration in the form of an urban crisis became the means through which this industry fl irted with social and political criticism, thereby off ering dystopic national imaginations that were in contradiction to the national image of a modernising Iran propagated by the Pahlavi government. Th e fi lms conjured a dark representation of the terrifying world of the present to alert viewers to the dangers that the future could hold. Taking this temporal shift into account then, dystopic fi ctional fi lms of post-WWII cinema worked as harbingers of a horrid future. Around the mid-20th century, the legacy of war, post-war occupation, socio-political confl icts and the 1953 coup gave rise to

Th e Film Farsi industry off ered dystopic national imaginations that were in contradiction to the national image of a

modernising Iran propagated by the Pahlavi government

Cinema of urban crisis: Cinema of urban crisis: dystopic Tehran in ‘Film Farsi’ popular cinemadystopic Tehran in ‘Film Farsi’ popular cinema

Golbarg Rekabtalaei on how popular Iranian fi lms from the 1950s to the 1970s reveal the attitudes and anxieties of the times


the general notion that the moral stability of Iranian society was disappearing. Cinema was complicit in this socio-cultural disintegration. Materialism and consumerism, promoted through fi lm, theatres and their surrounding image culture, were responsible for the weakening of ‘the Iranian psyche.’ With the overpopulation of cities – due, in part, to a large infl ux of people from rural areas – and insuffi cient urban infrastructure and facilities, new social and cultural problems arose in urban centres that stemmed from the incompatibility of rural and urban social norms. Th ese social anxieties associated with Iranian modernity and rapid national modernisation became central to many Film-Farsi productions. In fact, the city of Tehran became the subject and setting of many popular fi lms.

From the beginning, Persian-language feature fi lm narratives had a close connection to the city, as can be seen in fi lms such as Haji Aqa, the Cinema Actor (1933) and Lor Girl (1933). Aft er a decade-long hiatus in feature fi lm production from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, the city loomed large again in mid-century productions. While the fi lms of the 1930s and early 1950s had a more ambiguous attitude towards the urban as a place of encounter, possibilities, and creativity, the fi lms of post-WWII increasingly viewed the city in a dystopic fashion. Moezzdivan Fekri’s Th e Shepherd Girl (1953) did not paint Tehran in a dark mode, but it highlighted the contradictions between the naïveté of villagers and the debased, money-driven and materialistic Tehranis. While including numerous shots of Tehran’s roundabouts and busy streets adorned with statues of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the fi lm depicted the conservative rural life as superior to an urban one, as Iranian moral norms seemed to have been disappearing in the cities. Samuel Khachikian’s Storm in Our City (1958), on the other hand, portrayed Tehran as merciless in an excessive form. While the ruthless cityscape alienated those who were already ostracised in a rapidly changing society, the fi lm granted the marginalised, such as single women and psychiatric patients, a place and a humanist face.

Mehdi Raees Firooz’s Th e Wild Angel (1959) portrayed the struggles of a single, unemployed young woman in a metropolis that failed to off er job opportunities to young women. In the fi lm, images showing the protagonist’s anxiety as she goes from offi ce to offi ce looking for a job, juxtaposed with images of modern, soulless and somewhat identical buildings, speak volumes about the atomising forces of modern life in a rapidly changing society. Saʻid Nayvandi’s Eve’s Daughters (1961) attended to issues of overpopulation in Tehran and the proliferation of overpriced and over-crammed apartment buildings. Opening with panoramic shots of Tehran, the narrator describes how ‘large squares, wide streets, and modern buildings’ lure villagers into the city on a daily basis, but because of the population infl ux, new buildings could no longer meet the demands of the people, creating ‘housing and rent problems.’ Th e fi lm demonstrates the confl icts between old and young generations, rural and urban lifestyles, traditional and new social norms, and how building tenants create the means to solve problems that arise from urbanisation – especially in the absence of an eff ective government.

Films such as South of the City (1958) – or Competition in the City (1963) – and Qaysar (1969) took a more critical outlook on urban life and the estrangement of its downtrodden, blurring the divide between popular cinema and alternative cinema. Th e urban in these fi lms was the site where Iranian values were destroyed by materialism (mostly associated with Western norms) and individualistic hedonism. In the face of urban trauma, popular fi lms promoted Perso-Islamic traditions as a panacea against the disenchantment of modern urban life. Th e space and rituals of Zurkhanah (a traditional type of gym), everyday religious practices, Islamic tropes and moral norms associated with rural areas and conservative boroughs, which fi lmmakers felt were vanishing in urban settings, became commonplace in many fi lms.

Film Farsi’s light-hearted portrayal of social issues and its frequent disengagement with realist cinematography common in Italian

neorealism and French New Wave fi lms was not to the liking of critics. Th e intelligentsia and fi lm critics such as Hushang Kavusi rebuked popular fi lms in favour of global arthouse and socially-committed fi lms which were compatible with the intellectual climate from the 1950s to the 1970s. Because of their concern with the everyday, however, popular fi lms too engaged social anxieties and national debates of the time, albeit in cheerful narratives with happy endings. Attending to the city became one of the ways through which Film Farsi tackled pre-revolutionary social distress. Th e dark representations of the city worked as a form of urban criticism that embraced and rejected modernity at the same time. In the liminal space of its fi lms, Film Farsi imagined and unimagined the real, providing a multiplicity of realities that subverted the national image of progress that the Pahlavi state promoted, revealed something of the temperament of society and spoke to the sentiments of the masses.

Golbarg Rekabtalaei is a cultural historian of modern Iran and an Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University. She recently published Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Th e dark representations of the city worked as a form of urban criticism that embraced and rejected modernity at the same time

Film poster advertising Storm in Our City, directed by Samuel Khachikian



Parviz Sayyad: Parviz Sayyad: socio-political socio-political commentator commentator dressed as dressed as village foolvillage fool

Samad is arguably Iran’s favourite comic character, born out of a nameless village fool played by Parviz Sayyad on the Iranian Television series Sarkar Ostovar (1964). Hilarious, somewhat foolhardy and lovable, Samad made his way through eight highly successful fi lms laced with social observations and critique, as he moved from village to city, attended school, returned from war, became homeless, fell in love and turned into an artist amongst other transformative tales. Samad proved to be Sayyad’s most effi cacious body of work and evoked fi lm character.

Sayyad was born in Lahijan in 1939. He began his career writing and acting in the theatre before performing alongside other theatrical luminaries in Iran’s fi rst television series Amir Arsalan. His fi lm career began with the role of Hassan in Iran’s fi rst musical, Hassan Kachal (1970), written/directed by Ali Hatami. Th e lengthy opening credits with rhythmic underscoring and unusual pauses pace the scene of Hassan’s mother enticing him out of the house with apples. Bald Hassan meets Chelgis, who has been kidnapped by an ogre, and sets off on an odyssey as a romantic hero. Infused with varied musical vignettes paying homage to performance traditions from around the globe, the sung

dialogues are largely accompanied with Persian drumming.

Besides a successful commercial fi lm career, Sayyad was a persistent supporter of ‘Cinemaye Motefavet’ (‘alternative cinema’), which sought to go beyond commercial cinema, now largely grouped as ‘New Wave’ and, post-1979, associated with the likes of Kiarostami, Panahi & Farhadi. Cinemaye Motefavet was initiated and developed by Farrokh Ghaff ari (fi lm intellectual who opened an infl uential fi lm club 1949, and set up the ‘National fi lm archive’), Farrokhzad (poet and realist fi lmmaker), Bahram Beyzai (literary, theatrically nuanced and considered sonic landscapes), and the singular vision of Shahid Saless; other contributors include fi lm-directors Parviz Kimiavi, Bahman Farmanara and Kamran Shirdel. Dariush Mehrjui’s remarkable fi lm Gav (Th e Cow, 1968), with Hormoz Farhat writing minimal amounts of music for the score using only a handful of instruments and Masud Kimiai’s memorable Qaysar (1968), with its melodic

and highly orchestrated, infl uential score by Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh, provided, respectively, the high art and artful commercial vistas of Motefavet fi lms.

Sayyad fi rst became involved in Motefavet fi lms in 1965. In 1972 he produced and acted in two Ali Hatami fi lms. Khastegar (Th e Suitor, 1972), written and directed by Hatami and scored by Monfaredzadeh, utilises Western art and Iranian classical instruments. It follows a man’s lifelong pursuit of a feckless, selfi sh woman who lets him down time and again, at one point leaving him for her singing teacher; the fi lm concludes with a tragic, poignant scene. Sayyad then produced and acted in Hatami’s Sattar khan (1972) about an important revolutionary leader in Tabriz during the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, which eventually led to the overthrow of the Qajar Dynasty. Fereydoun Naseri’s score employs solely Western art instruments, with one musical celebratory scene showcasing an array of Persian instruments.

Roya Arab describes the indelible mark Parviz Sayyad left on Iranian cinema

Besides a successful commercial fi lm career, Sayyad was a persistent supporter of ‘Cinemaye Motefavet’ (‘alternative cinema’), which sought to go beyond commercial cinema

Poster advertising Parviz Sayyad’s One Man Show (2018)


I mentioned to Sayyad that the themes – urban/rural, rich/poor, modernity/tradition – represented by arthouse

and some commercial fi lms had helped nurture the Revolution. He responded ‘I wanted change not revolution…’

Sayyad then acted in Asrar ganj dareheye jenni (Th e Ghost Valley’s Treasure Mysteries, 1974), one of only two feature fi lms made by Ebrahim Golestan. In it he played an arrogant villager whose fi nancial gains – from treasure he discovers and sells – bring much woe. A French horn appears in the village, amidst other exotic objects, showcasing his fall from grace. Th e fi lm has a sparse score using Western and Iranian instruments by Farhad Meshkat and contains a surreal celebratory scene with a motley crew atop a hill with song and dance. A highly allegorical fi lm about buried artefactual treasure leading to ruin, the fi lm could be read as referring to Iran’s wealth of natural resources and their misuse, with some commenting that the character stood for Mohammad Reza Shah. In the same year Sayyad produced Still Life (1974), written and co-directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless. In 1977 he co-produced Dayereh Mina (Th e Cycle) by Mehrjui, with Farhat’s minimal musical touch, unapologetic and acerbic social commentary focussing on a blood bank harvesting and selling the blood of drug addicts and street lowlifes to hospitals with relevance beyond Iran, for at the time of writing this essay, the USA fi nally admitted to supplying bad blood to the UK in the 1980s.

During the last few years before the 1979 Revolution, Sayyad wrote, directed and produced Bon Bast (Dead End, 1977), in which a girl presumes the man appearing regularly at the end of her street is a suitor and fantasises endlessly about love, only realising in the fi nal scene that he was in pursuit of her politically active brother. Th e fi lm has no score, in the vein of Iran’s ‘New Wave’. However, Bon Bast contains a spate of pre-composed Western songs emanating from electronic devices in private and public settings. Sparingly and intentionally placed, these, along with posters of musicians including Beethoven and Eno, provide narrative and cultural underpinning. He followed this up with directing and co-producing the highest-grossing pre-revolution fi lm, Dar Emtedad Shab (Along Th e Night, 1978) in which Googoosh – a successful singer and actress since the 1960s – plays a popular

singer pursued by a young handsome fan. Arguably risqué in subject matter and its portrayal of scenes of a sexual nature, the fi lm implied the existence of a corrupt power circle of elites operating in Iran. One of a few dozen Iranian fi lms made in colour pre-1979, it is scored by Mojtaba Mirzadeh and infused with musical scenes set in night clubs where Googoosh performs a selection of her popular songs.

Sayyad left Iran shortly aft er 1979. His fi lm, Th e Mission (1983) was one of the fi rst fi lms made by an Iranian outside Iran about the exilic condition post-1979. It depicts death squads deployed by the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) to assassinate oppositional agitators and follows an assassin in pursuit of a former offi cial in the Shah’s regime. By chance he saves his target from a mugging in the NY subway and realises he now works as a cleaner and not what the IRI’s regime made him out to be. Th e fi lm has no score but is punctuated with a live musical scene eliciting heated debate about music in Iranian society. In 1984 he made Trial of Cinema Rex as an attempt to make sense of the tragedy of the Rex Cinema fi re (August 1978) which took many lives and was a major a turning point in the lead up to the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime. Sayyad has since made and appeared in various fi lms, more recently providing the voice of Amir for the animated fi lm Roxanna (2018).

Sayyad has had a multi-dimensional career; he is an extraordinarily talented man who made us laugh, cry and contemplate through writing, directing, producing and acting in a wide range of fi lms and television series. Today, aged 80, he is still touring his one-man theatre show. Watching Iranian fi lms with a focus on fi lm

music, Sayyad initially piqued my interest when I saw him in Iran’s fi rst musical. Aft er viewing more of his fi lms, the nuanced use and portrayal of music – from his depiction of an Iranian pop star’s world in 1978 to discussions of music, its validity and place in Iranian society in 1983 – a lot of his fi lms echo the ongoing dialogue and dialectic between music and the socio-political context. As an artist who has collaborated on art and commercial fi lms, I mentioned to Sayyad that the themes – urban/rural, rich/poor, modernity/tradition – represented by arthouse and some commercial fi lms had helped nurture the Revolution. He responded ‘I wanted change not revolution…these were concerns expressed in fi lms anywhere in the world where the process of agriculture to industry was taking place’. Whilst Sayyad is somewhat remiss in acknowledging the talents of post-Revolution Iranian fi lmmakers, we should not overlook his valuable contributions to Iranian cinema.

Roya Arab recorded music with various artists in the 1990s before undertaking an Archaeology BA and MA (IoA, UCL). She is currently a PhD candidate at City, University of London studying Iranian fi lm music and what it reveals about ongoing dialogue and dialectic between society and music/musicians

Roya Arab (left) and Parviz Sayyad (right) at ‘Three fi lms from Parviz Sayyad’, Ealing Green Met (Theatre room) in London, United Kingdom, July 2018. Photograph by Ali Akbar Arab.



The 1950s was the commercial and artistic peak for fi lm noir in America and France. Th ese American and French noirs were being shown to a wide audience in Iran at the time as well. Responding to the public interest for such stylised visions of the criminal underworld, Iranian fi lmmakers adopted this popular style and created their own brand of noir-inspired gangster fi lms intended for the domestic market. Among them, director Samuel Khachikian is regarded as the forerunner and referred to as the ‘Iranian Hitchcock’ and master of the crime thriller in Iranian cinema.

In the late 1950s Samuel Khachikian’s crime fi lms revelled in Hollywood tropes, taking the US-inspired lens to the Iranian underworld. His fi lms featured villainous characters, typically involved with drugs, kidnapping and counterfeiting money, as well as deceitful femme fatales, who would assist the criminals and use their feminine charms and sexual allure to

seduce and deceive the male protagonist and then betray him.

With the continuation of the state’s eff orts to enforce modernisation from above, the confl ict between modern and traditional values was established as a theme, and a new form of the crime thriller appeared in Iranian New Wave cinema, which was darker and more pessimistic than the earlier more hollow eff orts.

Masud Kimiai was among the fi rst of his generation to focus solely on crimes and criminals in his fi lms, a niche which he continued to pursue throughout. Friendship, betrayal and revenge are the most common thematic elements

of Kimiai’s fi lms. He usually picked his characters from the lowest rungs of Iranian society: soldiers, day labourers, hoodlums and peasants. Th ey were people who were suff ering from poverty or were the victims of injustice and inequality.

In Kimiai’s masculine world we see hard-boiled characters clashing against each other without any kind of mercy. His emphasis on masculinity in society takes precedence over all else. Women oft en play a minor role in his fi lms; usually they live under the heavy shadow of men and need their support to survive in a patriarchal society. Th e focus oft en lies on highlighting brutality and what motivates it. Whilst his protagonists are

The noir world of The noir world of Masud KimiaiMasud Kimiai

Parviz Jahed outlines the development of the crime thriller in Iranian cinema through the works of Masud Kimiai

As an innovative forerunner and a key fi gure in the development of Iranian New Wave cinema, Kimiai was

fascinated by American fi lm noirs and passionate about the portrayal of rebellious anti-heroes

Behrouz Vossoughi as a vengeful anti-hero in Masud Kimiai’s Qaysar


Hokm (2006) contains the most constant thematic and stylistic elements of Kimiai’s crime fi lms: male

camaraderie, deception, revenge and betrayal

contemporary in their appearance, they look to the past with lamentation and regret (a past that is always with them and which they cannot break away from).

Kimiai’s fi lms, whether an anti-Zionist political piece like Sorb (Th e Lead,1989), or a post-war drama such as Dandan-e Maar (Th e Snake Fang, 1990) and Gorouhban (Th e Sergeant, 1991), or street-drama epics such as Radd-e Pa-ye Gorg (Th e Wolf ’s Trail, 1992), Soultan (1996) and Eteraz (Protest, 1999), or a purely gangster fi lm like Hokm (Th e Verdict, 2006), all look to expose and represent criminality, violence and heroism.

As a former assistant of Khachikian, an innovative forerunner and a key fi gure in the development of Iranian New Wave cinema, Kimiai was similarly fascinated by American fi lm noirs and passionate about the portrayal of rebellious anti-heroes and disaff ected people plagued by poverty and crime. He introduced a more sophisticated form of criminal drama to Iranian cinema in 1968 with his remarkable fi lm Qaysar.

With his rebellious and anarchic attitude and a yearning for justice, Qaysar becomes the fi rst true anti-hero in Iranian cinema. Th e fi lm combined the protagonists of revenge-seeking American Westerns and the dark desperation of fi lm noir. It is the story of a young, alienated traditional man who attempts to avenge his sister’s rape and his brother’s murder by a villainous gang. Unlike the pivotal characters of the previous Iranian crime dramas, Qaysar is not driven by money or love, but solely by revenge. Qaysar’s gruesome realism, graphic violence and doomed characters had never been seen before in Iranian cinema. Th e audience was impressed by the main character’s values and sympathised with his rage and desire to get even.

In the traditional Iranian crime genre, a happy ending was an uncompromising formula, but in the new crime fi lms such as Qaysar, the rebellious character’s criminal acts and anti-social behaviour were in fact glorifi ed by the fi lmmaker. Qaysar was the victim of injustice in a world rife with violence, rage and despair. Th e boundary between good and evil was blurred and the new heroes bore more

similarity to and fewer distinctions from the villains.

Aft er making a few fi lms within the crime genre, Kimiai made his powerful political drama, Gavaznha (Th e Deer) in 1975. In Gavaznha, the criminality has a political resonance and Kimiai addresses some critical social issues such as the confl ict between good and evil, bank robbery, armed struggle, police brutality, class division and drug addiction which were familiar elements in American noir fi lms. Gavaznha may be regarded as the fi rst political crime thriller of Iranian cinema. Th e protagonist was acting against the interests of the government out of political motivation and, as a protagonist on the run, he provokes sympathy from the audience on a primal level.

Whereas Kimiai’s Gavaznha was a one-off as a political thriller made before the 1979 Revolution, the early post-Revolutionary crime fi lms were mostly about the confl icts between anti-Shah guerrillas and the police. In Khat-e Ghermez (Red Line, 1981) – one of the fi rst fi lms to be banned by the authorities aft er the Revolution – a high-ranking secret agent of the Shah’s notorious SAVAK marries a woman whose brother is arrested for his political activities on the verge of the 1979 Revolution.

In Kimiai’s Sorb (Th e Lead, 1987), which takes place in 1950s Tehran, the criminals are part of a covert Zionist organisation attempting to assassinate

a young suspected Jewish couple who decided to immigrate to the recently founded state of Israel. Th e infl uence of an American noir visual style and iconic elements are highly prevalent, including the bleak atmosphere: the problematic and lonely characters trapped in unwanted situations, the dark and smoky urban setting, the low-key lighting, the period specifi c cars, customs, guns, the atmospheric music and the harsh violence.

Hokm (2006) contains the most constant thematic and stylistic elements of Kimiai’s crime fi lms: male camaraderie, deception, revenge and betrayal. Th e most intrinsically noir element of Hokm is the inevitability that dictates the fates of the fi lm’s characters and the actions that drive them towards disaster, an element sustained from the mob fi lms of the 1930s.

Kimiai has managed to perfectly capture the dark, gloomy, demoralising and violent atmosphere of fi lm noir in Hokm. His conscious employment of fi lm noir elements – such as high contrast lighting, seen especially in the outdoor scenes, and closed frames – convey the feeling of confi nement and helplessness in people. Th e overall eff ect leaves the viewer feeling that this fi lm is set in a city rendered helpless as it sleeps at night while criminals slither through it like wandering ghosts.

Kimiai has found in fi lm noir the perfect means to express the ruthlessness, violence and corruption that pervade within the heart of Iranian society. By placing the characters and the story in such an environment, he underlines the decadence of humanity and demonstrates the idea that people are ruled by material values and a malicious spirit.

Parviz Jahed is a fi lm critic, fi lmmaker and lecturer in fi lm studies, script writing and directing. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Cine-Eye, a fi lm journal published in London. He is also the author and editor of a number of books and essays on Iranian and world cinema, including the two volumes of Directory of World Cinema: Iran, published by Intellect in the UK. He is doing his PhD at the University of St Andrews on the origins of the New Wave cinema in Iran



Damascus Time: Damascus Time: the resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinemathe resurgence of Iranian ‘Sacred Defence’ Cinema

In 2018, Iranian media outlets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) insisted that a fi lm called Damascus Time, directed by Ebrahim Hatamikia, be submitted as the Iranian representative to the Oscars. Th eir bid, to their outrage, was unsuccessful and another fi lm was submitted. But why is the IRGC suddenly interested in the Oscars? And why this specifi c fi lm? To answer these questions, we need to go back to the 1980s when the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War gave rise to a new state-funded movement in Iranian cinema: the movement that came to be known as ‘Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema'.

In 1989 aft er watching Hatamikia’s third fi lm Th e Immigrant, Morteza Avini, an iconic fi lmmaker/writer of Sacred Defence Cinema wrote, ‘Hatamikia blows his whole existence into the frames, and each time he sets himself on fi re so that his fl ames can shed a light, and each time like a phoenix, he gains life from that fi re’. With this fi lm Avini had found a new hope in the capabilities of fi ction fi lms in showing what he called ‘the truth of the war’ and the ‘ideals of the Islamic

Revolution’. He started to believe that creating a new Islamic inspired form of cinema ‘freed from the shackles of the dominant Western cinema’ was possible.

In 1993, while shooting a documentary about the war, Avini was killed by a landmine. He did not live long enough to witness the later fi lms and the downfall of his ‘phoenix’. In 1998, Hatamikia made his eighth Sacred Defence fi lm: Th e Glass Agency. Despite the long-standing claim of creating a truly independent

Kaveh Abbasian contrasts the ideals of state-funded Sacred Defence Cinema with modern realities

In the 1980s the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War gave rise to a new state-funded movement in Iranian cinema: the movement

that came to be known as ‘Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema’

ISIS commander and captive Iranian pilot in Syria. Backstage photo from Ebrahim Hatamikia's Damascus Time (2018). Photograph by Owj Arts and Media Organisation


While the Sacred Defence Cinema has now expanded its defi nition to include fi lms about the involvement

of the Islamic Republic in current wars, this new wave has strayed further from its early ideals

cinema, Th e Glass Agency was an obvious adaptation of Dog Day Aft ernoon (1975), a Hollywood production! A similar fate awaited other Sacred Defence fi lmmakers. With the growing national disinterest in the topic of the war, many of them – including Hatamikia – stopped making war fi lms. For a while it seemed like the ‘sacred defence’ had given up its claim on cinema.

Th is phase came to an end with Iran’s involvement in recent wars in the Middle East. Aft er 23 years of not making a war fi lm, Hatamikia went back to his roots with the 2014 release of Che, which was about the war in the 1980s. He followed that with Bodyguard (2016), a story about a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War and his struggle to protect the son of his old ‘martyred’ comrade, who is now a nuclear scientist in danger of being assassinated by foreign powers. And eventually in 2018 he released Damascus Time, a fi lm about the involvement of Iranian pilots in ‘humanitarian activities’ in the Syrian civil war.

Hatamikia is not alone in this new wave of Sacred Defence fi lms; many others, including a new generation of fi lmmakers, have joined the wave too. Iran’s Fajr fi lm festival has also been paying special attention to these fi lms and awards have been directed towards them. Th is New Sacred Defence Cinema is particularly signifi cant when understood as part of the current policies of the Islamic Republic regarding the political situation in the Middle East. As part of its internal policy, the state presents its territory as an ‘island of stability’ in a turbulent region. Th is ‘island of stability’ is depicted as being under ‘foreign threat’ and ‘heroes’ – such as the three main characters in Hatamikia’s last three fi lms – are presented as the saviours. Considering this political affi liation, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Bodyguard, Damascus Time and several other recent Sacred Defence fi lms are produced by the IRGC-funded Owj Arts and Media Organisation, which was founded in 2011. In this year’s festival two war fi lms produced by the Owj organisation took home nine out of sixteen Crystal Simorghs. Th e Lost Strait (directed by Bahram Tavakkoli) was awarded six Simorghs, including Best Picture; Damascus Time received three, including Best Director.

While Sacred Defence Cinema has now expanded its defi nition to include fi lms

about the involvement of the Islamic Republic in current wars, this new wave has strayed further from the early ideals of Sacred Defence Cinema theorised by the likes of Avini. Western methods of story development and character building are ever more present in these new fi lms, and the action scenes are clearly planned under the heavy shadow of Hollywood cinema. Hatamikia’s last two fi lms, Bodyguard and Damascus Time, are good examples of this Western infl uence. He decided to shoot these two fi lms based on storyboards. For this purpose, he employed Soheil Danesh Eshraghi, a young artist known for his Western-styled comic characters. Th e result is a surreal combination of Western comic-book aesthetics and Islamic ‘heroes’ who try to ‘save Iran from the West’!

In Damascus Time the mixture of these comic-book elements along with exaggerated character make-up and excessive use of relatively poor CGI (computer-generated imagery) creates a situation where the fi lm looks more like an out-of-date video game rather than the reality of the Syrian civil war and the proclaimed ‘sacrifi ces’ of the Iranian pilots. Th is was the fi lm that IRGC-affi liated media outlets championed; they started a campaign to try and persuade offi cials to send it to the Oscars. Perhaps by doing so they hoped the fi lm would reach a larger international audience, ultimately achieving what it was meant

to achieve: justifying Iran’s presence and criticising Western involvement in the Syrian civil war. But those offi cials proved to be more pragmatic and chose another fi lm: No Date, No Signature, a fi lm with dark social content reminiscent of Iran’s past successful bids for the academy award.

What is clear now is that Sacred Defence fi lmmakers have quietly given up their claim of creating a ‘new form of cinema’. But the need to make war fi lms in order to propagate Iran’s ruling ideology still remains, and large amounts of state funds continue to fl ow towards those fi lmmakers closest to the centres of power. In the middle of all these state-sponsored war propaganda fi lms, and in an atmosphere dominated by calls for war, one is tempted to ask ‘where is Iranian anti-war cinema’? With only a handful of attempts at making anti-war fi lms, in a system where censorship is an omnipresent aspect of fi lmmaking, anti-war cinema is the forgotten part of Iranian Cinema. Perhaps, with the emergence of accessible methods of fi lmmaking, the Iranian anti-war cinema will consist of fi lms that will be watched not on the large screens of mainstream cinema venues but on the small-yet-inspiring screens of underground fi lm collectives.

Kaveh Abbasian is a fi lmmaker and lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. He is a former fellow of John W. Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. His PhD thesis is titled Th e Chronicle of Triumph: Iranian National Identity and Revolutionary Shi’ism in Morteza Avini’s Sacred Defence Documentaries



Everybody Knows (2018), in the same vein as world famous Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s seven other movies, is a social family drama with an emphasis on concealment and what remains unsaid. On the occasion of her sister’s wedding, Laura returns with her children to her native village in the heart of a Spanish vineyard. But unexpected events disrupt her stay and resurrect a past long buried.

In most of his fi lms, Farhadi focusses on

young, middle class couples torn between tradition and modernity, between the past and the future. By using signifi cant indices – such as a lack of warm colours in clothes and set design and the selection of desaturated colour palates to set the tone and atmosphere of his fi lms – Farhadi reveals a cold relationship between the couples in his movies. Th e couples also display few gestures of love or aff ection, and few comforting words are exchanged.

No matter which geography he chooses,

from Tehran to Spain, stopping by Paris, betrayal, lying and secrets are the leitmotivs of the Farhadian style. He pushes these themes so far that the form embraces the substance, the fi rst becoming a tool for the establishment of the second. Ellipsis is one of Farhadi’s favourite narrative techniques, which puts the spectator in a situation of uncertainty until he decides to reveal a truth.

In Everybody Knows the spectator discovers more information as the story progresses; a character reveals a secret to another character and at the same time to the spectator, or important information is divulged through a secretive conversation between two characters.

Ellipsis is one of Farhadi’s favourite narrative techniques, which puts the spectator in a situation

of uncertainty until he decides to reveal a truth

Asghar Farhadi’s Asghar Farhadi’s cinema: a family cinema: a family torn aparttorn apart

Asal Bagheri provides a brief analysis of Everybody Knows

Film poster advertising Everybody Knows, directed by Asghar Farhadi


In the beginning of the fi lm, a young girl, Irene, who is later the victim of a crime, discovers that her mother, Laura, and a family friend, Paco, were lovers in their youth. Later, Laura reveals to Paco that Irene is his daughter and informs her family that her husband has been unemployed for more than two years. Even more shocking is the discovery of a kidnapping plot, information that the fi lmmaker withholds from the audience until the very end of the fi lm.

Women despite menIn all of Farhadi’s movies, women try to

do something to change the problematic situations the couple fi nds themselves in, despite the refusal of the men. In Fireworks Wednesday (2006), Mojdeh follows her husband to fi nd out if he is unfaithful, and in the process she gets hit by him; meanwhile, the mistress is the one who fi nally ends the relationship, despite her lover’s pleas. Rouhi, the housekeeper feels compelled to testify to the loyalty of his employer, despite his doubts, in order to save the couple’s relationship. In About Elly (2009), Sepideh repeatedly lies to save a situation, starting with the beginning of their journey where she lies to the owner of the villa about Elly and Ahmad’s relationship. Finally, it is for one of her lies that Sepideh gets violently hit by her husband. In A Separation (2011), it is Simin who decides to leave her husband; and later, Simin also tries to fi x a tricky situation by attempting to pay the caretaker that her husband, Nader, shoved out the door and onto the stairs. Th e caretaker, Razieh, who is responsible for looking aft er Nader’s elderly father, and her husband also have a similar Farhadian relationship: Razieh works without the knowledge of her husband in order to pay his debts. She is also ultimately the one who makes the decision not to accept money from the well-to-do Simin and Nader, because she is no longer sure that the loss of her baby was due to Nader’s mistreatment of her.

In Everybody Knows Laura, played by Penelope Cruz, like all other women in Farhadi’s movies, seems to be a passive woman. Nevertheless, she is the one, despite her husband’s refusal, who decides to reveal a very important secret to save her daughter from kidnappers. Revealing

to Paco that Irene is his daughter, she puts him in a moral dilemma. She asks him to sell his land to pay the kidnappers. In Farhadi’s cinematographic structure, women always fi nd ways out of the defi ned ethical frames to save the situation and in the end, men, by choosing the ethical ‘right way’, settle the situation.

Th e unbearable weight of the familyIn Everybody Knows, the heavy weight of

family relationships and the unsaid secrets over the years is depicted from the fi rst frame. But more than the images, it is the soundscape of the fi lm that is witness to the unfolding revelations: from the ticking of a clock (suspense), to the too early ding-dong of a bell (the announcement of a ceremony that will go wrong), to the roar of a drone fl ying over a wedding party (the overhanging gods that dictate the fate of mortals), to the thunderclap that precedes the vibration of a telephone (the devastation of a mother who reads a message confi rming her greatest fears), to the creaking of a poorly oiled door that resonates in a deserted house (the loneliness of a man who sacrifi ced his existence). It is this soundscape that communicates to the audience the heavy atmosphere of the story and indicates the taboos that will soon blow up.

Th e sound obeys a well-defi ned rhythmic strategy, encapsulating thriller moments while pointing out the emptiness of the images that scroll on the screen. Because emptiness is perhaps precisely the subject of the fi lm, Farhadi insists on

the emptiness of the small epiphanies in the family reunions: the outraged mind of a parent who tries to make a child laugh, the exaggerated dance of a party-goer who amuses the gallery, and the embraces of a family that is gradually going to break apart over unresolved old confl icts.

Th e invisible threads of social classesTh e triggering event of the story, the

kidnapping of a girl in the midst of a bourgeois wedding celebration, shakes the superfi cial harmony on screen. Th e euphoric snapshots of siblings celebrating the wedding are juxtaposed with the faces of onlookers contemplating, without joy. Th us, Paco (Javier Bardem, the true hero of the fi lm) initially suspects his emigrant employees of being behind the abduction, not by purely racist refl ex but by asking the perverse question ‘What if ...?’ before being himself violently brought back to his social origin (he is the son of a servant) by the patriarch of the family.

Th e fi nal wordEverybody Knows, in addition to the

usual themes of Farhadi’s cinema, such as diff erences in social classes, depicts the complete deterioration of the foundations of the family. Th e grandfather of the family, an elderly man, is a lonely man who is hated by the entire village. Over the years he has lost his fortune due to gambling. Th e new groom of the family and his young wife hate their family. Laura’s husband is bankrupt and unemployed. Paco sells his vineyard, his only possession, and his wife may be leaving him. And fi nally, the joyful Irene is turned into a beaten and traumatised girl. Th ree generations mistreated by the script reveal allegories of an ailing past, present and future. Insisting on symbols and objects (the clock, a door tossed by the wind), Farhadi depicts a tragic thriller which laboriously gives fl esh to fate.

Th e soundscape communicates to the audience the heavy atmosphere of the story

and indicates the taboos that will soon blow up

Asal Bagheri has a PhD in Semiology and Linguistics, with a specialization in Iranian Cinema. She’s the author of the thesis Men & women relationships in post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema: Directors’ strategies and semiotic analysis. Her forthcoming book, which will be published in French, is entitled Feelings, Love and Sexuality: the Cinema’s Dilemma in Islamic Republic of Iran



Film poster advertising Tehran Taboo (2017), directed by Ali Soozandeh

Homeland is oft en a subject of diasporic representation. Migrant fi lmmakers imagine their place of origin in various ways based on political positions, personal and familial experiences as well as aesthetic choices to do with the stories they wish to tell. Oft en the representations of homeland tend to be of a boundless and timeless place that is nostalgically fetishised. In contrast, political exiles tend to construct their place of origin as claustrophobic places of surveillance. Exploring three recent diasporic directors’ fi lms that are set in Iran – namely, A Girl Walks Home

Alone at Night (2014), Under the Shadow (2016) and Tehran Taboo (2017) – I will discuss their representations of homeland, exploring how the new generation of diasporic Iranian fi lmmakers construct Iran as a narrative space in contrasting but intersecting ways that at once resonate with the award-winning Iranian cinema of the last four decades and broaden its boundaries in bold new directions.

Shot in California, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is Ana Lili Amirpour’s fi rst feature fi lm. It is a beautiful black and white vampire fi lm set in an Iranian town called ‘Bad City’, where

giant oil pumps feature in the industrial landscape, women wear the veil outdoors and dance to popular music indoors, and everyone speaks Persian, albeit oft en less than perfectly. Th e street signs, the graffi ti and even people’s tattoos are in Persian. Th e fi lm is more black than white in every sense of the word: Bad City is a lawless place where corpses pile under a bridge and a violent, drug-pushing pimp has his profession tattooed on his head. Th e only force for good is a chador-clad skate-boarding female vampire who avenges the marginalised, particularly the female victims of patriarchy. Her wearing of the black chador (a head-to-toe cloak) subverts the stereotypical iconography of the veil and the oft en taken-for-granted unidirectional, subjugating power relations read into it. Her chador fl oats in the air behind her like a cape as she glides on her skateboard down the street,

Th e new generation of diasporic Iranian fi lmmakers construct Iran as a narrative space in contrasting but intersecting ways that at

once resonate with the award-winning Iranian cinema of the last four decades and broaden its boundaries in bold new directions

Imagining homeland Imagining homeland from a distance:from a distance: new diasporic visions of Irannew diasporic visions of Iran

Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad explores how and why diasporic Iranian fi lmmakers set their fi lms in Iran


making her look like a superhero. Th e chador also allows the vampire to blend in with the darkness as she lurks at night waiting for her next villain-cum-victim.

Th ere is more to the ‘Iranian-ness’ of the fi lm than the veil. Like the now-cliched image of middle-class youth in Tehran, there is a Western style party which Arash – the James-Dean lookalike would-be lover of the vampire girl – attends. Some of the middle-class youth wear a plaster over their noses as a recognisable mark of having had plastic surgery, as is fashionable in Iran. Th e fi lmmaker has billed the fi lm as ‘the fi rst Iranian vampire Western’; thus, on the one hand, the fi lm draws on the director’s Iranian background, including her knowledge of Iranian popular music, as well as the admiration for Iranian cinema in the West. On the other, it makes a connection to vampire and Western fi lm genres that are less relevant to Iranian cinema.

Under the Shadow (2016) is a horror fi lm set in Tehran, Iran (but shot in Jordan) and entirely in Persian. Th e fi lm is the British-Iranian director Babak Anvari’s fi rst feature. Th e director has painstakingly brought the Persian-speaking diasporic cast together from all over the world and has used photos and memories of his childhood in Iran to recreate the Iranian space in Jordan.

Th e story is about a young woman called Shideh and her 7 or 8-year-old daughter Dorsa who are residents of a block of fl ats in Tehran during the Iraqi bombing raids in the late 1980s. Th e opening titles declare that at the time Iran went through rapid political and cultural transition as a legacy of the bloody 1979 Revolution. Shideh has been expelled from her course in medicine at university for political reasons during the so-called Cultural Revolution. Her husband, Iraj, who goes away to the war front, tells her repeatedly on the phone that she must leave Tehran to go to his parents in the north of Iran to be safe from bombing raids. When an unexploded Iraqi bomb literally penetrates the building from the top and leaves much of it cracked other residents abandon the building. Refusing to give up her independence, Shideh stays, a decision with grave consequences; imaginary or ‘real’ ghostly jinn appear

to enter the building through the cracks created by the bomb and infect the lives of Shideh and Dorsa.

Anvari has recreated the horrors of the fi rst decade of the post-Revolutionary period to chilling eff ect. Th e surveillance regime and socio-political oppression, including the forceful imposition of the veil on women, are overtones of the atmosphere in and out of the building. Th e ghost appears mainly as a faceless chador-clad woman. Shideh once takes fright when she suddenly sees her own refl ection in a black chador in the mirror before taking it off in disgust. However, the veil is not an icon in and unto itself: the child, Dorsa tells her mother that the ghost insists that Shideh cannot look aft er her but she could. Her husband tells her on the phone that she cannot look aft er Dorsa, calls her a ‘whore’, ‘useless’ and ‘nothing but a disappointment’. Shideh looks at her medical books with longing, particularly one in English gift ed and signed by her mother. Th e chador represents the claustrophobic role of ‘housewife’ which is being imposed on her. In a frightening scene Shideh enters the fl apping, oversized tent-like chador/ghost to rescue Dorsa, who is being swallowed by it.

Th e third fi lm is Tehran Taboo (2017) by Ali Soozanzadeh, a German-Iranian fi lmmaker. Th e fi lm is done in rotoscope, with live action characters turned into animation with digital background images that strongly resemble Tehran. Th is noir Persian-language fi lm tells three intertwining stories from the seedy

underbelly of Tehran about two women and a man whose lives intersect through a narrative about their sex lives. Such themes are oft en alluded to in fi lms made in Iran but are here explored in sordid detail, including an aff air between a clergyman/judge and a prostitute. Th is beautifully created, animated fi rst feature comes portrays Iran more accurately than the two live action fi lms mentioned previously, or any other diasporic fi lm for that matter. Th e cityscape that forms the background of the fi lm is remarkably Tehran-like and the dialogue mimics the language spoken on the streets.

While tales of desperation, loneliness and patriarchal hypocrisy dominate the fi lms, there are subtle but prominent traces of optimism in and about them. Th e fi lms’ production in Persian and detailed settings in Iranian time-space are testimony to the strong following of Iranian fi lms in the West, including a sizeable Iranian diaspora with cultural capital and a critical eye for detail. In each fi lm there seems to be a very conscious eff ort to improve on the predecessors to create a more detailed construction of the fi lmic location as Iran. Th e fi lms, particularly the last two, show deep critical knowledge of urban Iran, including the lives of the cosmopolitan youth. Like much of post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema, they all feature complex gender politics with strong female characters in battles with the patriarchy. Finally, all three are visually stunning, wonderfully craft ed and innovative fi lms, each of which has a cinematic freshness that is on par with some of the best fi lms made in Iran.

Th e fi lms’ production in Persian and settings in Iran are testimony to the strong following of Iranian fi lms in the West

Dr Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad lectures at the Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS. He is the author of Th e Politics of Iranian Cinema: Films and Society in the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 2010). His current research is about transnational media and new modes of authority in Shi’i Islam


REVIEWS: FILMSREVIEWS: FILMS

‘Poets of Life’ & ‘Poets of Life’ & ‘Puzzleys’, part of ‘Puzzleys’, part of the the KarestanKarestan series seriesDirected by Shirin Barghnavard & Mehdi Ganji, respectively

Reviewed by Taraneh Dadar

New Iranian Cinema – as the arthouse fi lms coming mostly out of post-revolutionary Iran were referred to in Western fi lm circles – was known for its unique blend of documentary and fi ction, with fi lms such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up (1990) putting Iranian cinema fi rmly on the world map. But while New Iranian Cinema is an established national tradition, not enough is known about Iran’s equally rich documentary cinema.

Since its birth in 1900, Iranian documentary cinema has gone through numerous changes, but has maintained its resilient, innovative and subversive spirit, making the best of whatever support has been available and surviving and thriving in the face of challenges, from fi nancing and production to exhibition and distribution.

A taste of this spirit was showcased in SOAS on 24 November 2018, with the screening of two documentaries, Poets of Life (Shirin Barghnavard, 2017) and Puzzleys (Mehdi Ganji, 2017), followed by a Q&A session with Barghnavard and seasoned directors Rakhshan Banietemad and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb.

Th e two fi lms are part of Karestan, a documentary series about unsung local heroes in Iran, celebrated for their entrepreneurial skills and commitment to creating a better world around them. Th e idea of the series was conceived in 2013 by renowned Iranian auteur Rakhshan Banietemad, whose long career spans documentary and feature fi lms with a strong focus on social issues and strong female characters. Together with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, another acclaimed Iranian

documentary fi lmmaker, they launched the Karestan project in spring 2015.

Against the backdrop of Western and domestic pressures on Iranians, the series has set itself the simple yet daunting task of giving hope: through the stories of men and women who have overcome all sorts of obstacles to realise their dream, be it to start a locally-owned eco-feminist paddy fi eld, establish a charity for treating children with cancer, or create a 100 per cent waste recycling plant.

Puzzleys tells the story of how four students living Birjand – the capital of South Khorasan province – move to Tehran to launch their start-up to create an app which allows others to create their own apps. Poets of Life off ers us a glimpse into the life of Shirin Parsi, a farmer, environmentalist and social activist who works against all odds to produce organic rice, promote sustainable farming and campaign against the use of chemicals. Structured around Shirin’s daily activities, and punctuated by her voice-over reading her poems, the fi lm is a tribute to one woman’s determination to build a sustainable, local economy despite the corruption, mismanagement and greed that challenges her vision. Planting her tomatoes, she tells the camera: ‘My happiness is as big as this tomato, that strawberry, as big as those worms. My sorrows I choose not to dwell on.’

Seven fi lms have already been made as part of the series, as listed on the Karestan website. Another key fi lm in the series is Touran Khanum (2018), about the life of Touran Mirhadi (1927-2016), a visionary educator who believed that ‘peace needs to be cultivated at childhood’.

Directors Banietemad and Mirtahmasb shot the fi lm over the last four years of Mirhadi’s life. Aft er the state broadcaster IRIB refused to show the fi lm, the two took the unusual step of relying solely on online screenings in a massive campaign endorsed by many other celebrities. Th e proceeds from the screenings were donated to the Children’s Book Council, and the Encyclopaedia for Children and Young Adults, both founded by the late Mirhadi.

Indeed, independence in production and exhibition is key to Karestan’s business model. In the lively Q&A session which followed the screenings at SOAS, the fi lmmakers emphasised time and again their determination to stay independent in funding, choice of subject matter and avenues for exhibition, and outlined the enormous challenges involved in doing so. In this, the discussion off ered a glimpse not just into the Karestan project, but also into broader issues that independent Iranian documentary cinema grapples with.

Th e Karestan series is available to watch on IMVBOX, a streaming service for Iranian fi lms with English subtitles. More info can be found at www.karestanfi lm.com

Taraneh Dadar is a communications professional based in London. She did a PhD on gender and popular cinema in post-revolutionary Iran

Local women working on a paddy fi eld in northern Iran. Still taken from Shirin Barghnavard's documentary Poets of Life (2017)

© Peym

an Houshm

andzadeh/Karestan


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June 2018, Hurst, £25.00

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By Mehran Kamrava

Th is book investigates how ecology and politics meet in the Middle East and how those interactions connect to the global political economy. Th rough region-wide analyses and case studies from the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden, the Levant and North Africa, the volume highlights the intimate connections of environmental activism, energy infrastructure and illicit commodity trading with the political economies of Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Th e book’s nine chapters analyse how the exploitation and representation of the environment have shaped the history of the region – and determined its place in global politics. It argues that how the ecological is understood, instrumentalised and intervened upon is the product of political struggle: deconstructing ideas and practices of environmental change means unravelling claims of authority and legitimacy.

September 2018, Hurst, £25.00

Environment Politics in the Middle Environment Politics in the Middle East: East: Local Struggles, Global ConnectionsLocal Struggles, Global ConnectionsEdited by Harry Verhoeven

Th e Saudi off ensive launched in 2015 has made Yemen a victim of regional power struggles, while the global ‘war on terror’ has labelled it a threat to international security. Th is perception has had disastrous eff ects: the country’s complex political dynamics have been largely ignored by international observers – resulting in problematic, if not counterproductive, international policies. Yemen and the World off ers a corrective to these misconceptions and omissions, putting aside the nature of the world’s interest in Yemen to focus on Yemen’s role on the global stage. Laurent Bonnefoy uses six areas of modern international exchange – globalisation, diplomacy, trade, migration, culture and militant Islamism – to restore Yemen to its place at the heart of contemporary aff airs.

October 2018, Hurst, £35.00

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