In this new—and lasting—wave of Persian cinema, the movies are not just about them but also about us

      GIVEN IRAN’S fertile and internationally lauded cinema, the event, which draws festival programmers from around the world, always has its share of revelations, disappointments and controversies. Yet as with so much in Iran, sometimes the most resonant encounters at Fajr are those which happen out of public view, involving films that aren’t on display. Such episodes underscore the extraordinary tenuousness of filmmaking in Iran.
       Consider these telling anecdotes during a visit to Fajr in 2002:
At his home in northern Tehran, Abbas Kiarostami describes his new film “Ten,” in the final stages of editing. Iran’s most lionized director internationally, Kiarostami is known for making daring artistic leaps, and this sounds like another one: his first dramatic feature shot on digital video—and his first film centered on women—it takes place entirely within the confines of a car. Will audiences sit still for 90 minutes of rapid-fire, claustrophobic conversation? Sounding more excited than apprehensive, Kiarostami notes that the film contains not only formal challenges for cinephiles but moments that conceivably could rile Iran’s censors.
One day late in the festival, Bahman Ghobadi comes down from the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan carrying reels of his still-in-production new film, excerpts he screens for myself and another critic in a private editing room. Bearded, intense and still weary from travel, the young Kurdish director describes the challenges of making a film that follows an old man and his sons on an odyssey from western Iran into the wintry mountains and refugee camps of Iraq. Ghobabi’s film follows its characters’ itinerary, slipping across the Iran-Iraq border. The filmmaker seems equally concerned about the watchful Iranian authorities—and Saddam Hussein’s army.
To most foreign visitors at Fajr, it is known that a couple of highly anticipated films had been excluded from the festival, apparently for political reasons. Manijeh Hekmat, the director of one of these suppressed films, “Women’s Prison,” was determined to reach foreign critics and programmers, however, and quietly invites several to meet in a hotel lobby one night and go to see the movie in a private location. But soon we see Hekmat run across the lobby in tears. Her producer confides that the director has just received a phone call from unnamed authorities, who—with no evident irony—say that if she shows “Women’s Prison” to us she will be immediately sent to women’s prison. The screening, of course, is canceled.
       Perhaps surprisingly, a year after these encounters and the uncertainties (and dangers) they revealed, all three movies are on view in the United States. Kiarostami’s “Ten” had its U.S. debut at last fall’s New York Film Festival, opened theatrically in March and is still making its way around the country. Ghobadi’s “Marooned in Iraq” (originally titled “Songs From My Homeland”) began its career in U.S. art houses in late April, as American troops were consolidating their hold on Iraq, and it, too, is making its way around art houses and universities. And Hekmat’s “Women’s Prison” was recently shown at a festival in San Francisco and last week’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York, accompanied by its director. It will go into general release later this year.
       On home ground, however, these films have met with very different fates, again proving the startlingly unsettled nature of cinematic endeavor in Iran. Had I been asked a year ago to predict which filmmakers would be able to get their movies onto Iranian screens, I would have guessed that the much-lauded Kiarostami had the best prospects, followed by Ghobadi, whose debut, “A Time for Drunken Horses,” won accolades at Cannes and acclaim in many countries; “Women’s Prison,” on the other hand, seemed highly unlikely ever to be shown in Iran.
       As it turned out, reality nearly reversed my expectations. Amazingly, “Women’s Prison” was not only allowed a general release in Iran but turned into a sizable hit. (It was also so controversial that it provoked riots and was banned in several cities.) Ghobadi’s film, meanwhile, was allowed only a brief run at a marginal Tehran cinema. And Kiarostami’s movie proved so objectionable to the authorities that it is unlikely to be released in Iran anytime soon.
       Increasingly, this is the paradoxical situation: Iranian films that have only the most tenuous or troubled prospects in Iran find dependable, welcoming showcases in the United States and other parts of the West. It is a remarkable turn of events considering that as recently as a decade ago, the very notion of an Iranian movie being distributed successfully in America would have provoked disbelieving laughter from U.S. distributors. Popular foreign films, everyone knew, came from scenic, “sexy” locales like France and Italy, Japan or Sweden. Iran, the renegade Islamic theocracy that took Americans hostage in 1979, was the last place any sane viewer would look for a cinematic “next big thing.”
       That began to change with the surprise success in 1996 of Jafar Panahi’s “The White Balloon,” a comedy about a little girl trying to buy a goldfish, that, like certain other trailblazing Iranian films, combined a gentle, humanistic tone with striking cinematic sophistication. The following year, Kiarostami’s bleak, challenging “Taste of Cherry,” about a man contemplating suicide, won the Palme d’or at Cannes. The year after that, Majid Majidi’s “Children of Heaven” became the first Iranian movie to be nominated for an Oscar (for best foreign-language film). From there the floodgates opened, to the point that now Iranian films are regular, familiar attractions on the U.S. art-house, film-festival and museum circuits.

         Granted, such releases reach only a tiny fraction of the audiences for “The Matrix Reloaded” or the Iraq war on TV. But the viewership that has embraced these films has done so en masse. It’s not just a few isolated films or one or two directors that have succeeded. “Iranian cinema” currently connotes a general level of interest associated with few if any other national cinemas. Why is this? I would suggest that, at least partly, it owes to what the films show Americans about “them”—and about us.
       First, about “them.” Islamic cultures now stand as the great “other” to the West, a matter not just of cultural interest but of pressing geopolitical concern. The first Iranian films that succeeded in the West—lyrical, child-centered comedies like “White Balloon” and “Children of Heaven”—forcefully reminded us that these Muslims of the news reports are also people, too, with families, dreams and troubles not unlike our own. Meanwhile, the films’ assured, delicate artistry recalled the great heritage of Persian culture, with its vast poetic and philosophic sophistication. More recent films, like the two by Bahman Ghobadi, give us concrete, complex, up-close views of the hardships faced by an Iranian minority, the Kurds. At a time when America is occupying Iraq, it’s hard to understate the fascination of a film that lets us hear Iraqi Kurds voicing their vehement feelings about Saddam Hussein. In the largest sense, Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities. We don’t get such rich, nuanced views of these challenges from any other medium.
       Now, about us. The first response many Americans have on encountering Iranian films is, “I had no idea….” That reaction often gives way to a realization that our electronic media cocoon us in images that reduce an intricate reality like contemporary Iran to a single, endlessly repeated visual cliché: bearded fanatics shaking their fists at the “Great Satan” in a staged street demonstration, say. Iranian movies thus confront us, sometimes uncomfortably, with how limited our views of other cultures are. No less strikingly, the films’ profound humanism, gentleness and intelligence can’t help but ask why such values in our cinema have largely been swept away by images of escapist fantasy, aggression and violence.
       The political implications of Iranian films are, of course, wide-ranging, and American viewers understandably wonder how a repressive government like Iran’s could engender or permit such a flowering of provocative artistry. Do these films exist because of the Islamic Republic or despite it? In fact, the answer is a little of both. Just after returning to Iran in February 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini gave his blessing for the continuation of cinema, at a time when some hard-line Islamists were urging its abolition by burning movie houses. In the early ’80s, inspired by Khomeini’s vision of a benign, socially useful cinema, progressives in the government mounted a plan to revive the film industry and assist moviemakers in making artistically worthy films that not only could enlighten the new nation but also go abroad and win friends for Iran on the world stage. The institutional foundations for the Iranian cinema’s renaissance of the late ’80s and beyond were laid by this initiative.
       Certainly, postrevolutionary Iranian filmmakers faced, and still face, severe content restrictions (e.g., unmarried men and women cannot even be shown holding hands) and the government’s backing had a conspicuous downside: Whenever suspicious hard-liners replaced supportive progressives in the halls of power, the screws tightened on venturesome artists. Yet in general, Iran’s rulers saw enough value in its vital cinema never to attempt a complete crackdown, as happened in China in the mid-’90s. And in a sense, their calculation paid off: for a decade beginning in the late ’80s, many Iranian films radiated a kind of idealism that broadcast to the world a generally positive image of Iran.
       In the last few years, however, that image has grown much darker and less flattering, if no less fascinating. Ironically, Kiarostami’s suicide-themed “Taste of Cherry,” arguably the harbinger of this new mood, premiered in the same week in 1997 that the moderate intellectual Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran. Khatami gave Iran’s progressive majority hopes for sweeping changes in the direction of greater liberalization and cultural openness. In subsequent years, though, most of those hopes were dashed as hard-liners blocked his reforms. As a result, artists began probing Iran society’s frustrations and failures.
       Recent years have brought a flood of films that deal with social problems like drug abuse, prostitution, prejudice, exploitation of refugees, illiteracy, corruption, the murder of liberals by shadowy enforcers and so on. The difficulties faced by women in Iran inform numerous movies. One of the most famous of these, Jafar Panahi’s “The Circle,” was so uniformly scathing that some accused it of pandering to foreigners’ prejudiced views of Iran (a charge reflecting the undoubted fact that some of these controversy-courting films are more assured of reaching audiences outside of Iran than inside). Besides Hekmat’s “Women’s Prison,” other films providing courageous accounts of women’s issues have come from Iran’s growing corps of female directors: among these, Marziyeh Meshkini’s “The Day I Became a Woman,” Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s “Under the Skin of the City” and Tahmineh Milani’s “The Hidden Half” were recently released in the United States (and like most of the films mentioned in this article, are or will be available on video and DVD).
       Such films of pointed social criticism are not limited to fictional features. Iran has a booming documentary-filmmaking scene which turns out films that are getting increasing international exposure. One of the best to emerge this year, Maziar Bahari’s 53-minute “Along Came a Spider” (it was recently shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and will be aired on HBO this fall), provides a stunning account of an unapologetic serial killer, a man who claims that he was doing society a favor by murdering 16 prostitutes. Astonishingly, many of his neighbors and family members agree, revealing an aspect of Iranian society that considers its government too liberal. Such surprising realities may not be pleasant, but they need to be confronted and understood, which is another reason American viewers should seek out—and care about—the intrepid visions of Iranian filmmakers.