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.

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.

An Iranian dissident returns home

Popular filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has returned to Tehran from exile. In an exclusive interview, he explains why.

A scene from "The White Meadows", 2009, Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran. Courtesy The Global Film Initiative Blog. 

by Sune Engel Rasmussen, Al Jazeera America

Friends and family warned Mohammad Rasoulof not to return to Tehran. The award-winning director still had a prison sentence looming over his head after being arrested during a shoot in 2010, charged with threatening national security and making propaganda against Iran’s Islamic state.

Rasoulof’s friend and collaborator, the renowned director of “White Balloon,” Jafar Panahi, who was arrested at the same time, is still under house arrest. Further, Rasoulof had just released his most uncompromising film to date. “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” — which won the International Federation of Film Critics Award at Cannes and is currently screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art — is an undisguised criticism of Iran’s feared security services, and Rasoulof’s most overtly political work yet. Still, he ignored the advice and came home.

He arrived in Tehran in September 2013, a month after the inauguration of President Hassan Rouhani. The police confiscated his passport, but have otherwise left him alone so far. Rouhani has promised to bring change to Iran, and although that change is moving slowly, things are certainly different from when Rasoulof lived here four years ago.

“When I was arrested, I was saying the exact same things as Mr. Rouhani is saying now. I wonder why nobody arrests him,” Rasoulof says with a laugh.

The 42-year-old filmmaker shuffles around his backyard in a washed-out black sweatshirt, dragging his plastic slippers along the ground with every step. When he sits back in his chair at his small working table, shaded by a tree, he can enjoy something close to silence. This is the only interview he has agreed to since his return, but he does not seem nervous. Here, sheltered from the frantic noise of Iran’s capital, Rasoulof has room to breathe. And that is exactly what many Iranian artists hope to get under Rouhani’s government.

“Of course, one has to be very stupid to think that after Rouhani’s election, the entire Islamic Republic will change,” Rasoulof says. “The important thing is that we can help move things slowly in the right direction.”

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.

Parviz and a new way forward for Iranian cinema

Government restrictions compounded by pressure from the international market have eroded great Iranian filmmaking 

Levon Haftvan in Parviz. Courtesy Guardian.

by Houman Harouni, Tehran Bureau, Guardian

For the past five years, Iranian cinema has been in a lull. Compared to the intense culture of experimentation that characterized the three decades following the 1979 revolution, the past half-decade has seen a retreat to safer and less compelling grounds. There are two main causes for this phenomenon: first, the limitations imposed on filmmaking by the government; second, the pressure of the international market. It should be no surprise if the two forces seem to push in opposite directions. Most of what happens in the so-called developing world happens at the confluence of these forces. For art to be more than entertainment, it must withstand both types of pressure.

On the one hand, censorship and barriers to production and distribution within Iran have become unbearably restrictive to many filmmakers. Some of the country’s most influential directors, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi, have moved abroad and now live in what is effectively artistic exile. In part due to this distance, their recent pictures have lost any sense of immediacy.

Ghobadi’s Rhino Season (2012), for example, is supposedly about the plight of Iranian Kurds, but it might as well take place on the moon – or a Hollywood set. Instead of acknowledging the exile status of its production, the film tries to re-create Iran, the way the western movie industry re-creates ancient Rome or Persia; as a result it looks flat, displaced, literally without a background. The lead role is played by Italy’s Monica Belluci, who struggles through her Farsi lines, and the storytelling puts pathos into overdrive, taking the viewer’s emotions for a ride. The two forces, oppression at home and the global market’s demands, are clearly at work here.

A less immediately obvious but more significant example comes from Iran itself: Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation (2011), which tries to walk the razor’s edge between social commentary and popular appeal. It was seen, simultaneously, as both an art film and a sound financial investment. It also managed to criticize Iranian society without attracting the wrath of the erratic, often venomous censors in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration.

A closer look shows how much Farhadi had to sacrifice for his success. To avoid the censors, it is basically unable to depict the reality of any of its subjects: it cannot show physical intimacy between a couple, or represent religion, the legal system, or the economy in any depth. But if it is possible to work around these obstacles through irony and guile, there is still Farhadi’s need to make a marketable film. He reduces a serious topic to who-done-it detective drama, withholding important information from the audience to create cheap suspense. The narrative’s central dilemma, the struggle between the rising middle class and the traditional working class, is resolved squarely in favor of the honest, hard-working middle-class family. If only those pesky poor people would let us get our divorces in peace! The film loses much of its power on a second viewing.

Edinburgh Int’l Film Festival 2013: From Tehran to London

by Michael Pattison, Front Row Reviews

At the present crossroads, the conditions under which Iran’s national cinema is being made (or not being made, as is often the case) are as worthy of analysis as the films themselves. Precisely because Iranian filmmakers are currently under threat of artistic censorship and/or legal restriction (such as house arrest or even a prison sentence), however, their output has enjoyed an unquestioned critical status, as if an artist working within and against such suppression is by default a genius. As Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film demonstrated last year, though, courage is not equable to insight. Condemnation of a political regime does not therefore preclude criticism of the art conditioned by it; for too long now, Iran’s more internationally celebrated filmmakers have, for numerous reasons, misplaced their focus and/or shirked the grander questions facing them.

In the case of Mania Akbari’s latest work From Tehran to London, it’s unlikely that anyone will see the film without prior knowledge that only half of it was completed. It opens with a dedication to “all the filmmakers in Iran, who have served a prison sentence and the ones who are still in prison”, and toward the end of its 45 minutes the director herself tells us in voice-over that production was stopped after crew members were arrested; to begin with, Akbari had never been granted permission from the Iranian government to make the film. While it’s important to draw attention to this continually criminal administration, the fear is that the film itself is consequently celebrated as an inherently perceptive work.

This is not the case. From Tehran to London, originally titled Women Do Not Have Breasts, unfolds as a series of conversational exchanges between a petty bourgeois couple Ava (Neda Amiri) and Ashkan (Bijan Daneshmand), living in their plush home on the outskirts of Tehran, and their housemaid Maryam (Elahe Hesari) and Ava’s sister, Roya (Akbari). The film’s single-take set-ups will be familiar to those who have seen Akbari’s notable debut 20 Fingers (2004), as will the kind of talky intellectualising and cerebral but tempestuous self-assessments with which its characters converse. Sourness is never too far away.

The tragic endings of Iranian cinema

Iranian cinema has effectively undergone a "brain drain" due to the policies of the Islamic republic.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, among many others, has been banned from filmmaking in Iran. Courtesy Reuters and Al Jazeera

by Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera

They say choose your enemies carefully, for you will end up most resembling them. The trap is particularly treacherous for artists living under political tyranny. One can now see the wisdom of why the leading Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has so carefully skirted politics, even in the direst circumstances, and thus safeguarded his cinema from falling victim to that overriding wisdom. One hundred years from now, the best of Kiarostami's cinema will still mesmerise, baffle, and reward, when many other politically potent filmmakers will scarce be remembered.

Kiarostami's longtime protege Jafar Panahi, however, has not heeded that wisdom, or the logic of his own mentor, and thus now seems like one of the most precious victims of the brutal theocracy he has valiantly opposed and to whose trap, alas, his cinema is falling head first.

Jafar Panahi's most recent film, Parde/Closed Curtain (2013) "has won the top prize for best screenplay at the 63rd Berlin film festival". Co-directed by Kamboziya Partovi, and in defiance of a 20-year ban on filmmaking, "the winner of the 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Panahi has been held under house arrest since December 2010 for allegedly making antigovernment propaganda".

Needless to say, the custodians of the Islamic republic weren't very happy with the events in Berlin: An Iranian filmmaker that was banned from making any films went ahead and made a film that won a top prize at a major European film festival.

According to reports, "Iran has protested against the awarding of a Silver Bear to Jafar Panahi for his film Closed Curtain (Parde) at the 63rd Berlin film festival, the ISNA news agency reported."

What would become of a filmmaker when his work of art is so crowdedly fused with the politics of his time?

Behind Closed Doors

Iran's International Fajr Festival

Smog covers the Milad telecommunications tower as it appears behind traffic lights in northwestern Tehran. Courtesy of AFP/Getty Images and Qantara.

The organizers at this year's Fajr Festival appear to have been chiefly concerned with issuing the mandatory conclusion that in view of the countless protest movements, the West is at the end of its tether. But even at this state-sponsored cultural event, Iran's very own crisis is tangible.

by Amin Farzanefar, Qantara.de

The Iranian capital Tehran is one of the most polluted cities in the world. At an altitude of 1,500 metres, the thinning air is exacerbated by the fact that due to fuel supplies limited by sanctions, three-and-a-half million cars run on home-brewed diesel. On good days, you can just about make out the Milad Tower – the film festival took place on the ground floor of the 6th tallest tower in the world in the world – through the haze of smog. But even here, Iran's crisis is tangible.

For a while, it was touch and go whether the festival would take place at all, due to concerns that there was barely enough celluloid material to make the film copies. Organisation was more chaotic than usual: The catalogue wasn't ready until three days after the festival had had begun, few of the films had been subtitled, and simultaneous interpretation for foreign correspondents and curators, of which there only appeared to be a handful on this occasion, also came to an end at some point.

There were nevertheless a few choice films for local audiences: Michael Haneke's "Amour", Volker Schlöndorff's French resistance film "The Morning Sea" and Roman Polanski's biting comedy "God of Carnage".

Discussing Islamophobia and Iranophobia in Tehran

A conference held on the sidelines of the festival – the "Third International Conference on Hollywood and Cinema" – attracted considerably more international guests than the event itself.

Berlinale — Odes to Banned Iranian Work

Panahi Returns, an Artist is Re-Discovered

The Iranian Director Jafar Panahi. Courtesy Artinfo

by David D'Arcy, Artinfo

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi was back at the Berlinale this year, or at last his new film Closed Curtain was. Last year Panahi was a member of the jury, represented by an empty chair – a tribute, but this was the chair B.C., Before Clint, before Dirty Harry weaponized it as an insult prop at the Republican Convention.

Panahi is under house arrest in Iran for making propaganda against the Islamic regime. He is lucky that he is not in prison. His international reputation and the support of admirers outside Iran is largely responsible for keeping the regime from locking him up.  He is still banned from making films for 20 years. We’ll see what happens to him now that Closed Curtain is being praised.

Panahi’s new film is set in an apartment facing what looks like the Caspian Sea. They call it a lake in the subtitles. A man is hiding there, with his loyal dog, who steals the show. The dog watches television sadly as images show the government that mistreats its people killing dogs in the street and piling up their bodies. The man shaves his head, perhaps in the hope that he won’t be recognized if the curtain is pulled back. He attends to his work, yet there’s a constant temptation to leave the house and walk into the waves of the beach across the road, ending it all. The threat of suicide can rightly be seen as something special in Iran, where bombers do it as a service to God, or pay people around the world to do it.

Iranian Cinema – national domain or part of the world cinemas?

by Ulla Fudge

The broader framework of cinemas of the world combines certain ideas and ideologies, defining the main attributes yet in the same time often going beyond the basic understanding of its definition. One thing is certain, world cinema works as oppose to the hegemonic Hollywood paradigm. Instead of commodification and standardization, world cinema underlines their tendencies towards originality and self-depiction. Nagib Lucia argues that: ‘At the core of this proposal is the belief that different cinemas of the world can generate their own, original theories. They do not depend of paradigms set by the so-called Hollywood classical, narrative style and in most cases are misunderstood if seen in this light’ (Nagib, 2011). The world cinema tends to focus on the question of realism that is present outside and within the frame.  Certain representations and depictions of social constrain and values from a national point of view connoted onto a cinematic image, play against the artifice and wide spread disneylazation.

Yet this notion of different film practises that involve more complex narrative, lack of stars, location in deprived areas, low budgets and therefore less commercially driven distribution, defines those films as ‘the other’. Lucia Nagib disagrees with the definition, saying that: ‘In multicultural, multi-ethnic societies like ours, cinematic expressions from various origins cannot be seen as ‘the other’ for the simple reason that they are us. More interesting than their difference is, in most cases, their interconnectedness’ (Nagib, 2011). By opening and show casting the national aspects of particular countries to worldwide audiences the film makers of world cinemas not only reveal the unknown territories but interlink the image with the viewer, creating an experience that can also include an emotional or identification involvement. However the term ‘the other’ doesn’t always connotes isolation as such. It can also open the doors to foreign, unknown territories. Michael Chanan argues that: ‘From time to time we’re reminded of this otherness by new cinematic waves from countries previously beyond the horizon, like Iran or China, which stimulate great interest precisely because there is nothing like cinema to create new imaginary geographies of far-away and unknown places’  (Chanan, 2011). Indeed cinemas of the world through their forms of realism often show cast a different approach to stylistic and narrative notions, applying their own, separate set of rules, indicating a flow towards hybridisation rather than influenced by hegemonic film making. Especially film makers from nations that have strong ethnical, political and religious clashes like Muslims or countries with strong social injustice and disturbing past, found their niche within the frame of world cinema. One of them is Iran.

This essay will examine the Iranian film directed by Rakhshan Bani – Etemad ‘Under the City’s Skin’ (2001) as an example of a film that can be located within the framework of world cinema, beginning with a brief glance at the Iranian cinema as a whole. Further on I would like to focus on the world audiences and their experience in viewing ‘Under the City’s Skin’, also addressing the term of ‘national’ and the distribution processes employed within the global frame.

From Kiarostami to Panahi: The spellbinding films of Iran

The following article is based on a reproduction of a piece by Vaibhav Vats from 2009, published in the op-ed pages of the Indian Express. It was written at the height of the Green Movement; often politics does lead to the production of spellbinding art.



Through an astute lens

As the crisis in Iran escalates, the pictures of protests and unrest would not have surprised those who follow Iranian cinema closely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian cinema has developed a subtle language of dissent, circumnavigating the dreaded censors of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture and holding a mirror to the country’s fissures. Film critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote in Newsweek, “Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities.”

The most visible struggle, for those of us who view Iran from the outside, is the issue of women’s rights. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, a film about the forced confinement of two women, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside, which trained its lens on the exclusion of women from football stadiums, are among several such acclaimed films.

But to understand how Iranian cinema articulates its political protest, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is particularly revealing. In the film, a dashboard cam eavesdrops on a divorcee’s impromptu conversations with fellow passengers in car journeys across Tehran which bring Iran’s sexual and social policies into sharp focus. In one scene, a camera focusses on a character as she scratches wildly around her hijab in the summer heat. In another, the veil drops in a moment of catharsis but is quickly put back on — Kiarostami has made his point by showing us the exhilaration of the unlocked genie. In an environment where dialogue can swiftly be clamped down upon, Iranian cinema has mastered the art of subversive suggestion, without leaving any footprints.

Iran’s push into Egyptian film?

by Michael Rubin, AEI

The Islamic Revolution in Iran ushered in a period of enmity between Iran and Egypt. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary leader, made enmity toward and a firm belief in the illegitimacy of Israel a pillar of the new regime’s ideology. He put Egypt—the only Arab country to recognize Israel—in Iran’s sites. Relations deteriorated further after the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat: rather than condemn Sadat’s murder, the Iranian leadership celebrated it, even naming a Tehran street after Khalid Islambouli, Sadat’s assassin. Over the next three decades Iranian leaders regularly belittled Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, as a “pharaoh,” castigating both his dictatorial ways (Iranian regime rhetoric regularly depicts the Islamic Republic as a democracy) and implying that he belonged to the pre-Islamic world of the jahaliyya, the age of ignorance. Efforts at rapprochement between Iran and the largest Arab country repeatedly fell flat as Iranian hardliners castigated their reformist counterparts’ calls for improved relations with Egypt as a betrayal of both basic Islamic principles and Khomeini’s vision. Mubarak’s fall, however, coupled with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, led to hopes—at least in Tehran— for a renaissance in relations, if not a new Tehran-Cairo axis.

It is against this backdrop that this short excerpt from the semiofficial, hardline Fars News Agency, is interesting. While Tehran and Cairo have yet to re-establish full diplomatic relations— probably because of objections from Riyadh and Doha, both of whom are major donors to the faltering Egyptian economy—the Iranian Interests Section in Cairo is becoming increasingly more active and taking a far higher profile.

The Iranian encouragement to the Egyptian film industry is important. Cairo is the Hollywood of the Arab world. From Tangiers to the Tigris, Arabs watch Egyptian soap operas and full-length comedies. It is the Egyptian dominance of film that has led to the Egyptian dialect of Arabic becoming the most widely understood, perhaps even more so than the stodgy and formal “Modern Standard” dialect taught at most universities and in diplomatic parlors. Throughout the Mubarak years, Egyptian cinema has also been political. The Egyptian leadership used films like “Al-Irhabi” (The Terrorist) and “Al-Irhab wal Kebab” (Terrorism and Kebab) to satirize and ridicule Islamist groups. Having taken control, the Muslim Brotherhood sought its own revenge, trying and sentencing Adel Emam, the star of the films and Egypt’s best known comedian of the silver screen, to three months in prison for insulting Islam.