“Song of a Captive Bird”

She Dared to Write Poetry About Sex. Iranians Loved and Hated Her for It.

The Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967, when she was 32.

by Dina Nayeri, The New York Times

“I take the first true measure of my body and decide that it’s shame, not sin, that’s unholy.” It’s 1955 Iran and Forugh Farrokhzad, a soon-to-be divorced mother, awakens to sex and art in Jasmin Darznik’s novel, “Song of a Captive Bird.” A few pages later, having begun an affair with a progressive Tehrani editor, Farrokhzad writes the poem that will make her both a symbol of female strength and a notorious “woman without shame,” as Persian mothers like to say. In it she confesses, “I’ve sinned a sin of pleasure / beside a body trembling and spent.” She doesn’t hide behind metaphor, and she isn’t the meek beloved of the old poems. She acts on her own desires. When she pines, it isn’t for a romantic savior but for a body. Tehran is scandalized.

Farrokhzad was Iran’s most celebrated — and controversial — female poet, and Darznik, the Iranian-born author of the memoir “The Good Daughter,” recreates her sexual and creative liberation while exploring the threat she posed to social order in prerevolutionary Iran. By the year of Farrokhzad’s debut, the “New Poetry” of Nima Yooshij and Ahmad Shamlou — both men — had made Iranian verse more accessible, freer in form and subject matter. But critics instantly denounced Farrokhzad as a silly girl, dismissing her work as an outgrowth of the national fascination with the hedonistic West, a trend Tehrani intellectuals called “Westoxification.”

Farrokhzad was defiant, in life and in Darznik’s fiction: “By writing in a woman’s voice I wanted to say that a woman, too, is a human being. To say that we, too, have the right to breathe, to cry out and to sing.” By the 1960s, she had come to represent Iran’s New Woman. At once loved and hated, she was a literary sensation and an acclaimed filmmaker, who demanded that female desires, expressed in plain language, be given the weight of serious literature. Male poets had been writing breathlessly about women for centuries — why should the reverse be any less palatable?

How did Iranian cinema go global?

The films of Iran's Amir Naderi brings the world to his homeland, while bringing his homeland to worldly recognition.

Monte (Mountain). 2016. Italy/France/USA. Directed by Amir Naderi. Courtesy of the filmmaker and MOMA,

by Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera

On Friday 16 March 2018, I had the distinct privilege of joining legendary Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi and Dave Kehr, the curator at the Department of Film, on stage at Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York to launch a magnificent retrospective of his work.

Irresistible Forces, Immovable Objects: The Films of Amir Naderi begins with The Runner (1984), one of the last films he made in Iran and continues with the rest of his oeuvre that he directed in the US, Japan, and Europe.

This is not the first time the cinema of Naderi is celebrated in the US or anywhere else in the world. Over the last quarter century that I have known and been involved in his cinematic adventures, I have been a close witness to numerous similar celebrations in the US, Europe, and Japan, marking the unfolding thresholds of his unique and inimitable visionary artistry. 

How has Naderi navigated his illustrious cinematic career from a pioneering filmmaker in the rising moments of Iranian New Wave in the late 1960s up to such career celebrations around the world is the story of how Iranian cinema has transcended itself to become an unfolding drama in the course of world cinema. Naderi, just like his close friend and fellow luminary, the late Abba Kiarostami (1940-2016) - whom the world of cinema lost so tragically early - is no longer pigeonholed within any national cinema. He has, by the power of his singular imagination, assumed his unique signature.

How did that happen and what does it mean?