Exile, Censorship, and Pink Floyd: A Q+A With Curator Tom Vick on the Iranian Film Festival

Iranian film The President. Photo courtesy of the Freer and Washington Post.

by Steve Kiviat, Arts Desk; Washington Post

The Freer Gallery of Art may be closed, but that's not stopping the museum's annual Iranian Film Festival now in its 20th year. With the Freer closed for renovations, film screenings are taking place at the National Gallery of Art, East Building and the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. Iranian cinema—much like its country—is often the subject of both controversy and mystique, because of the Iranian government's stringent censorship. Tom Vick, the Curator of Film at the Freer and its sister museum, the Sackler Gallery, spoke to Arts Desk via email about this year’s selections, qualities of Iranian cinema, how Iranian directors work, which selections will appeal to non-cinephiles, and more.

Arts Desk: Can you tell me about the start of the festival? How has it evolved since then?

Tom Vick: The festival began 20 years ago (before my time), at the height of the Iranian New Wave, when directors like [Abbas] Kiarostami, [Mohsen] Makhmalbaf, etc., were getting a lot of attention for the creative and poetic ways they found to make artistic—and sometimes subversive—films despite Iran's strict censorship.

For many years, this mode seemed to dominate Iranian filmmaking, but I have noticed in recent years that Iranian directors are clearly being exposed to more kinds of films from around the world, and the style and subjects of their films are changing accordingly. In addition, the Green Revolution inspired some directors to take more bold political stances.  One thing that hasn't changed over the years is the devotion of the local Iranian community. They come out in droves for the festival, and always express their appreciation.

For those not that familiar with Iranian film, would you say the movies being shown this year have some common characteristics? Does that depend on if the film was made in Iran under the country's rules, or by an Iranian filmmaker working elsewhere?

Putting on the Iranian film festival is a labour of love

Iranian Film Festival Australia co-founders Armin Miladi, far right, and Anne Demy-Geroe, second right. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen Source: News Corp Australia, courtesy The Australian.

by Justin Burke, The Australian

“Film festivals are a bit like share houses,” says Anne Demy-Geroe, co-founder of the Iranian Film Festival Australia.

In fact, when The Australian first spoke to Demy-Geroe in February to document a year in the life of the IFFA, the festival and her house were for all intents and purposes the same thing.

“We all meet at my place at 7pm each Monday, two of the other people live next door, one of them used to work with me at Brisbane International Film Festival, and one of them is my student — it’s all very incestuous in that regard,” says the former artistic director of BIFF, now a teacher at Brisbane’s Griffith Film School.

“There’s a lot of healthy argument, and occasionally people get grumpy when people didn’t do the tasks they were supposed to do; there’s either green tea or red wine for that.

“It’s got to be fun, or else why do it?”

Indeed, fun aside, why anyone would take on the daunting challenges of presenting a foreign film festival is a good question. The financial rewards are often slim. The administrative and logistic challenges — from programming and catering to newsletters and social media — are onerous.

Kiarostami honoured as Iran film festival shows once-banned film

Juliette Binoche and William Shimell star in Certified Copy. Photo via Aceshowbiz.

Monavar Khalaj in Tehran, FT

With liberal films sidelined or banned, and scripts requiring government approval, five years ago Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s most celebrated film director, vowed not to make any more films in his home country. The government of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad had sent the message they “don’t want cinema”, he said.

The director has long riled conservatives in the Islamic Republic, once sparking outrage at home for kissing French actress Catherine Deneuve, a woman who was not his wife, at the Cannes film festival. But, in a sign of the increasingly open mood in Iran, Mr Kiarostami’s once-banned film, Certified Copy, opened the Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran last weekend.

“I did not expect the . . . festival to do such a favour not only to me, but also to purged films,” Mr Kiarostami told a packed audience at the festival before his movie was shown.

While foreign films are rarely shown in Iran, this year the festival has rejigged its schedule to give them a higher profile. In February it screened exclusively domestic films, allowing it to focus on international films for the April screenings. Most of the 150 films screened in April were foreign. The festival culminates on Saturday night with the award of the Simorgh prize for the best film.

Directed by Kiarostami in 2010, Certified Copy, set in Tuscany, is the story of a British writer and a French antiques dealer whose relationship undergoes an odd transformation over the course of a day. The film was originally banned in Iran because of Juliette Binoche’s low-cut dress. At last weekend’s screening, her chest was blurred to protect her modesty.

Even with this concession to Tehran’s conservative regime, the film’s screening highlights the growing vibrancy of Iran’s cultural scene.

Haji Baba of New York City

‘Parviz Khatibi loved his country enough to tell it the truth’

The 1952 edition of Haji Baba (republished in 1978), for which Parviz Khatibi was imprisoned. The left panel depicts Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh leading Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi – the ‘sacrificial camel’ – by the neck, while the right shows Haji Baba struggling with a ‘dictatorial camel’. Courtesy REORIENT.

By Leila Jarmanand and Caitlin Carlson, REORIENT

Satire has the power to spark great controversy, illuminate injustice, and help bring forth social change. Throughout the 20th century, Parviz Khatibi was a clear voice of dissent in Iran, and his work encouraged people to always question what they often assumed to be the truth. An intellectual, playwright, filmmaker, composer, and lyricist, Khatibi’s 55-year career was unparalleled in his country. Deeply passionate about politics, as well as pop culture, the sum of his life’s work was a hybrid of the two. He was radical in confronting domestic sociopolitical affairs through his journalism and cartoons, while still appealing to the mainstream as an entertainer, intellectual, and public figure. Khatibi was relentless in his work, and prolific out of necessity, stopping at nothing to expose the hypocrisies of his society.

Khatibi was born in Tehran to a large upper-class family in 1922. His maternal grandfather, Mirza Reza Kermani – who assassinated the Qajar monarch Nasereddin Shah in 1896 – was a follower of the revolutionary cleric Seyyed Jamaleddin Afghani. At the age of 12, Khatibi began his career in journalism by writing satirical poems, and rode his bike to the offices of Towfigh – the most prominent satirical newspaper of the time – to submit them. By the time he was 17, he was the youngest Editor-in-Chief the publication had ever seen. As religious and political freedoms waned in the 1940s, an 18-year old Khatibi pushed Towfigh to produce more provocative content. The publication’s founders were arrested and forced to temper their messages; yet, unwilling to censor his work, Khatibi began publishing his own weekly paper, Bahram, in 1946, and later, Ali Baba. These papers were characteristically bold in their critiques and satires of Iranian social, political, and cultural figures and events, and were banned from publication numerous times, until forced to shut down indefinitely. Khatibi soon learned that if he wanted to avoid censorship, he would have to be more subtle in his approach, especially towards political and religious figures.

Cars, drugs and virginity tests dominate Iranian film festival

Tehran’s Fajr film festival, which marks the anniversary of the Islamic revolution, has ditched weighty themes in favour of populist blockbusters

Mahtab Keramati stars in ‘Ice Age’, a thriller infused with betrayal, drugs and luxury cars. Photograph: Promotional. Courtesy The Guardian. 

by Tehran Bureau correspondent, The Guardian

Divorce, abortion and infidelity – set amid villas with blue pools and lavish gardens – were the themes dominating this year’s Fajr film festival, which ran 1-12 February in Tehran. But it was one of the weakest line-ups in recent years.

The winning films were geared towards the box office, full of popular actors and story lines awash with deception, drugs and betrayal. One wonders if such films even belong in an arts festival.

Gone were the heavyweight names predominant in last year’s festival and many of the featured film-makers were relative unknowns. Abolhassan Davoodi’s Mad Rook, which took home the most Fajr trophies (five, including best director and best film), was a standard teen thriller on the perils of social networking. A group of youngsters meet through Facebook and the wealthiest girl dares the boy from south Tehran to enter (what she thinks is) a deserted home. Chaos ensues.

Alireza Raeesian’s A Time for Love, featuring Leila Hatami, was another story of adultery and unwanted pregnancy, but lacked substance. The much talked-about The Girl’s House had a story line based on virginity tests. Ice Age was yet another thriller infused with betrayal, drugs and luxury cars. None was what we expect of Fajr, the home of Farhadi, Mirkarimi and Banietemad.

The symbol of Fajr has long been the simorgh, the mythical bird living in the heart of the symbolic Qaf mountain. The festival has added a new aspect to the simorgh’s character as the bird bringing Iran’s stories to the big screen through Fajr’s exploration of the deep layers of Iranian society. This year, those stories were replaced by expensive automobiles.

Adding to the jarring nature of the films were long advertisements for the festival’s two main sponsors, RighTel, the Iranian mobile network operator, and ZTE, the Chinese multinational telecoms company. Never before had audiences been exposed to so many adverts. As well, multiple RighTel stands were seen in every Fajr cinema, and in the festival’s closing ceremony, all winners were handed a gift bag from RighTel along with their trophy.

‘Melbourne’

Film Review: 

This remarkable debut from Iranian director Nima Javidi transcends cultural barriers with its compellingly universal and thoroughly engrossing premise.

Melbourne (2014)

by Peter Debruge, Variety

Why give an Iranian film an Australian title? In the misleadingly named “Melbourne,” the distant city is but an abstract idea — like Michael Haneke’s “The Seventh Continent” — of a new life far removed from the hassles and stress that hound its central couple. Set almost entirely in a Tehran apartment, where the action unspools virtually in real time, Nima Javidi’s unnerving debut takes an incredibly relatable premise (impossible to discuss without revealing the surprise) and invites auds to speculate what they might do in the characters’ shoes, effectively minimizing the distance that can sometimes limit Western interest in Iranian cinema.

“Melbourne” debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it kicked off the Intl. Critics’ Week sidebar, but has since managed to confuse potential champions as it travels the circuit, the title inadvertently disguising its true cultural identity. Fest programmers are constantly on the hunt for strong new Persian voices, and Javidi demonstrates enormous potential, judging by a feature that makes such strong use of its script and two central characters, Amir (another gripping turn from “A Separation’s” Peyman Moaadi) and Sara (Negar Javaherian, every bit his equal).

This seemingly ordinary middle-class couple have one foot out the door when we meet them, via a somewhat clunky introduction: The film opens on a flustered female census worker who arrives at Amir and Sara’s flat just as the two are packing their bags to leave. (The credits unspool over a hypnotic montage of clothes being vacuum-sealed into plastic bags, which might have been a wiser way to begin the picture.) She interviews them briefly — just long enough to establish that they are on their way to Melbourne, where the couple intends to spend three years — before disappearing.

Perhaps Javidi needed a device to distract us during the film’s opening reel, which focuses on the relatively normal confusion one might expect to find in an apartment whose residents are trying to juggle the last details before a major life change. Characters come and go, including a young woman (evidently a family member, though her connection isn’t clear) who fusses with a baby sleeping in the back bedroom. And the baby? Well, she belongs to a neighbor, whose nanny asked Sara to watch little Tina for a few hours on a day when her attention is clearly elsewhere.

Iranian Director Flouts Ban on Filming

For two decades, Jafar Panahi has offered a window into contemporary life in his native country despite pressure from the government

PET PROJECT: Iranian director Jafar Panahi's 'Closed Curtain' examines his country's ban on walking dogs in public.

by Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal

In Jafar Panahi's new movie, a writer in Iran smuggles his pet dog into his home inside a tote bag. The film, "Closed Curtain," addresses Iranian lawmakers' recent ban on dog-walking in public, part of an effort to curb perceived Western influences including keeping pets. For two decades, Mr. Panahi has captured such vagaries of life in his native country.

"Closed Curtain," which won the best screenplay award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013, opens at New York City's Film Forum on July 9. It is Mr. Panahi's second film since December 2010, when Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Court banned him from making movies for 20 years. 

The 53-year-old director has flouted the prohibition and continued to expand a body of work that has earned him critical acclaim around the world—and scrutiny at home. He first piqued the ire of Iranian authorities with "The Circle" (2000), which assailed the treatment of women under the country's Islamist regime. Six years later in "Offside," he mocked a law prohibiting Iranian women from attending professional soccer games.

As jury president of the 2009 Montreal World Film Festival, Mr. Panahi persuaded fellow jury members to wear green scarves to support Iran's pro-democratic Green Movement.

More than three years ago, Mr. Panahi was accused of spreading propaganda and undermining national security. He was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison—time he hasn't yet served—and forbidden from traveling abroad or giving interviews. 

Mr. Panahi's previous project, the documentary "This Is Not a Film" (2011), was shot almost entirely in his Tehran apartment. "Closed Curtain," which blends fiction and autobiography, was shot exclusively in his beach house beside the Caspian Sea. While the director is free to move throughout Iran, he isn't allowed to make movies.

Paris gives voice to Iranian cinema

Kami’s Party (Mehmouniye Kami), 2013, Dir. Ali Ahmadzadeh.

by euronews

The second edition of the Iranian film festival in Paris was a chance to find out more about the many faces of contemporary Iranian cinema.

Arthouse theatre Le Nouvel Odeon played host to the event, screening a wide variety of feature, documentary, animation and shorts films by Iranian directors.

“There is an ‘S’ on the word cinema in the title of the festival because from the beginning our main goal was to promote films both from within Iran by showing independent Iranian cinema, but also films produced abroad over the past decade. So the idea was to create a dialogue between cinema from within and without Iran,” said the festival’s director Bamchade Pourvali.

Young Iranian filmmakers were invited to come and show their works to the Paris audience. Among them was Ali Ahmadzadeh with his first feature film ‘Kami’s Party’, a road movie about Iranian youngsters wandering from one party to another – the kind of content which prevented the film from obtaining an official screening permit.

“For me, a film becomes underground when the director decides to shoot without applying for an authorization or when he tries in vain to get one. I mean when the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance doesn’t allow us to shoot using the script that we have submitted, the film goes underground,” explained the young film director.

Festival of Iranian short films connects a fragmented people

Annual LA event tries to promote Iranian heritage 

Kajart at work in their studio Photograph: /Kajart. Courtesy Guardian.

by Nushin Arbabzadah for the Tehran Bureau, Guardian

“I really hate to talk about politics,” said Kajeh Mehrizi, one of the four principals of the Toronto-based Kajart arts collective. Sporting a dapper mustache, he was every inch the artist doing his polite best to overcome an introverted nature and answer the questions of an inquisitive Afghan.

We were at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Kajart were declared winners of the Sixth Farhang Foundation Short Film Festival held earlier this month. Mehrizi and one of his colleagues – Taravat Khalili, a beautiful, reticent and soulful young woman – had told me that they had spent half of their lives in Iran and the other half in Canada. When I asked Mehrizi if he had returned to Iran since moving abroad, he said yes. But when I inquired what the experience was like, he clearly didn’t want to go into detail.

Kahlili was more forthcoming. She fought back tears as she recalled her trip to Iran two years earlier. “You know what it’s like,” she said. “People are angry about the sanctions and perpetually in a bad mood.” It was clear that the return had been bittersweet.

Kajart’s prize-winning animated short, Aghaye Past (Mr. Mean), addresses the misogynist patriarch, that cultural archetype that has haunted many an Iranian family through the generations. In this deeply spooky film, we see the patriarch’s son leave home at night, kerb crawling in Tehran’s red light district and picking up prostitutes in his car. We see that the effect of misogynistic abuse is neither confined within the family nor the mark of a particular generation. It’s an infectious disease that makes the whole society sick.