Justice for Iran

The great, late Anthony Shadid on the Photographs of Abbas Kiarostami

In April 2000, Abbas Kiarostami received the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. While in the United States, Kiarostami visited New York City, where the Andrea Rosen Gallery mounted the first US exhibition of Kiarostami’s photographs. The photographs, which were shown in a stark white loft space, appeared without titles, dates or labels. Anthony Shadid and Shiva Balaghi spoke with Kiarostami about his art photography. […]

“The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling,” he said. “It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas — photography and cinema — to become closer to one another.” […]

Like his films, his photographs are presented without expected guideposts that explain their significance. There are no labels, no titles, no dates. It is left to the viewer to lend them a particular meaning. Though it may appear that his lens reveals an unchanging and placid nature, Kiarostami’s photographs, in fact, seem to reveal a deeply political use of the landscape. “Photographs of nature are universal,” he said. “A tree has no ethnicity, no birth certificate, no passport, no nationality, therefore what difference does it make where in the world this tree is? What is important is the similarity between all trees, the similarity between all skies, the similarity between all landscapes. Nature has no specific culture. I am emphasizing this lack of ethnicity of nature. Therefore I do not want to mark the specific time and place of my photographs.” […]

By chronicling what he sees, Kiarostami said he views himself as a journalist, in a sense. His intervention, he said, is crucial to capture a moment in time. “A photojournalist covers the news from the scene of war, and I, with nature, cover the news of the scene of peace. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference; it is a difference in the selection of a subject. For a photo-journalist, a moment is important — the moment for taking a photograph. For a photographer of nature, this particular moment is also important. Without those moments, no image is worth recording. There is only one moment in which a photograph can be taken.”

Since the 1980s, when his films were first shown outside of Iran, Kiarostami has achieved a growing reputation as a filmmaker in the West. When asked if he sees a difference in his role as an artist within Iran as opposed to an artist producing for a Western audience, Kiarostami offers an emphatic response that signals the clearly political quality of the universality in his nature photographs. “No, in a sense, this is a question that has its answer in it. You ask me this question but know my answer. In my mind a human being has a universal quality. If there has been a division of humanity into smaller groups, it is because of economic and political condi- tions. And the framework of cultural conditions that exist are influenced by economics and politics. But mankind must be a universal being. It is my ambition that each person see themselves as a human being first and not as an ethnicity. These classifications occurred later, in my opinion. A person is not born with a birth certificate, with a passport. When you speak about a human being, and not about his culture or his nationality or his politics, naturally, you can communicate with all of the people of the world. And for this reason, each person who speaks at a profound level of humanity can be understood by anyone. Without nationality, language, tribalism and culture, all people are the same.”

Panahi, who had expressed support for Iran’s opposition green movement during post-election protests in 2009, has also been banned from making films, writing any kind of scripts, traveling abroad and talking to local and foreign media for 20 years.

His conviction comes despite a high-profile campaign by fellow filmmakers inside Iran and abroad to win his release. In March, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s most famous director, wrote an open letter to Iran’s authorities calling for the immediate release of both Panahi and another detained filmmaker, Mahmoud Rasoulof, who was also sentenced to six years in prison for his work on the same unfinished film. In April, a group of leading American filmmakers — including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola — signed another open letter on Panahi’s behalf. In May, days after Juliette Binoche was filmed crying as Panahi’s detention was discussed at the Cannes Film Festival, he was granted a temporary release on bail.

Last month, Panahi delivered an impassioned defense of his work as a filmmaker to the court in Tehran:

All said, despite all the injustice done to me, I, Jafar Panahi, declare once again that I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country and I like to work in my own country. I love my country, I have paid a price for this love too, and I am willing to pay again if necessary. I have yet another declaration to add to the first one. As shown in my films, I declare that I believe in the right of “the other” to be different, I believe in mutual understanding and respect, as well as in tolerance; the tolerance that forbid me from judgment and hatred. I don’t hate anybody, not even my interrogators.

Cannes: Juliette Binoche cried as the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami discussed the fate of his detained colleague, Jafar Panahi.

NYT: Detained Iranian Director Granted Hearing

Mr. Panahi, who was arrested on March 1 for supposedly working on “an antiregime film,” has been on hunger strike since Sunday. Judiciary officials have told his wife and lawyer that he could be released after a bail hearing on Saturday.

It is unclear if international efforts to draw attention to Mr. Panahi’s case have had any effect, but, as my colleague Manohla Dargis reported from Cannes on Thursday, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s most famous director, who went to the festival to screen a new film starring the French actress Juliette Binoche, began a news conference on Tuesday by speaking about his friend and colleague.

Mr. Kiarostami, who sent The Lede an open letter calling for Mr. Panahi’s release in March, said his detention was “intolerable.” He added, “When a filmmaker, an artist, is imprisoned, it is art as a whole that is attacked, and it is against this that we should react.”

Sitting beside Mr. Kiarostami, Ms. Binoche began to weep as a journalist sobbed while asking another question about Iran.

Jafar Panahi’s empty chair at Cannes

Unfortunately, Malick’s Tree of Life didn’t make the cut, but Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy with Juliette Binoche, did. (Previously)

The list.

Celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, published an open letter in a Tehran newspaper on Tuesday calling for the release of Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof, two directors recently detained by the authorities:

I don’t quite know to whom I am addressing this letter, but I do know why I’m writing it and I believe that under the circumstances it is both critical and inevitable because two Iranian filmmakers, both of whom are vital to the Iranian wave of independent cinema, have been incarcerated.

As a filmmaker of the same independent cinema, it has been years since I lost hope of ever screening my films in my country. By making my own low-budget and personal films, it has also been years since I lost all hope of receiving any kind of aid or assistance from the Ministry of Guidance and Islamic culture, the custodian of Iranian cinema.

In order to make a living, I have turned to photography and use that income to make short and low-budget films. I don’t even object to their illegal reproduction and distribution because that is my only means of communicating with my own people. For years now I have not even objected to this lack of attention from the ministry and cinema‫tic authorities‬.

Even if we choose to disregard the fact that for years now, the cinematic administrators of the country, who constitute the main cultural body of the government, have differentiated between their own filmmakers (insiders) and independent filmmakers (outsiders), I am still of the opinion that they are oblivious of Iranian independent cinema. Filmmaking is not a crime. It is our sole means of making a living and thus not a choice, but a vital necessity.

I have found my own solutions to the problem. Independent of the conventional and customary support granted to the cinematic community at large, I make my own short and independent films with hopes of gaining some credit for the people I love and a name for the country I come from. Sometimes the necessity to work calls for the making of films beyond the borders of my country, which is ultimately not out of personal choice or taste.

However, others, like Jafar Panahi, have for years tried to summon official government support, exploring the same frustrating path, only to be confronted with the same closed doors. He too has for years held hopes of obtaining public screenings for his films and receiving official aid and assistance from the relevant governmental bodies. He still believes that based on the merits of his films and the acclaim they have brought the country, he can seek legal solutions to the problem. The Ministry of Guidance and Islamic culture is directly responsible for what is happening to Jafar Panahi and his like. Any wrongdoing on his part, if there is any at all, is a direct result of the mismanagement of officials at the cinematic department of the Ministry of Guidance and it’s inadequate policies which in no way leave any choice for the filmmaker other than to resort to means that jeopardize his situation as a filmmaker. He too makes a living through cinema.

For him too, filmmaking is a vital necessity. He needs to make himself heard and has the right to expect cinematic officials to facilitate the process, rather than become the major obstacles themselves. Perhaps the officials at the ministry can not at present be of help in solving Jafar Panahi’s dilemma, but they need to know that they are and have been responsible all these years, for the dreadful consequences and unpleasant and anti-cultural reflections of such policies in the world media.

I may not be an advocate of Jafar Panahi’s radical and sensational methods but I do know that the cause for his plight is not a result of choice but an inevitable [compulsion].

He is paying for the conduct of officials who have for years closed all doors on him, leaving open small passages and dead end paths.

Jafar Panahi’s problem will eventually be solved but there are numerous young people who have chosen the art of cinema as their means of expression and careers.

This is where the duty of the government and the Ministry of Guidance and Islamic Culture, as the government’s main cultural body, becomes even more critical, for they face a large group of Iranian youth who aim to work independently and away from complicated official procedures and existing prejudices.

Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof are two filmmakers of the Iranian independent cinema, a cinema that for the past quarter of a century has served as an essential cultural element in expanding the name of this country across the globe. They belong to an expanded world culture, and are a part of international cinematic culture. I wish for their immediate release from prison knowing that the impossible is possible. My heartfelt wish is that artists no longer be imprisoned in this country because of their art and that the independent and young Iranian cinema no longer faces obstacles, lack of support, attention and prejudice.

This is your responsibility and the ultimate definition of your existence.

Abbas Kiarostami / 1388.12.18 [March 9, 2010] / Tehran

18. Abbas Kiarostami
Born: 1940, Tehran, Iran
Crowning Achievement: Taste of Cherry (1997)
The most poetic of Iran’s directors, Abbas Kiarostami won the Cannes Palme d’Or for his austere 1997 film Taste of Cherry, shifting the world’s focus to the stark, neo-realistic cinema of post-revolutionary Iran. In Kiarostami’s claustrophobic Ten, our gaze remains stuck on the woman driver and any number of her passengers as the agitated conversations touch upon the plight of Iranian women, as so many of the best Iranian filmmakers have done. Through the Olive Trees uses long takes and silences to map the emotional terrain of his female lead. But Kiarostami’s concerns extend beyond the feminine, to questions of mortality, justice and the mystery of life. These riddles lie at the heart of his greatest works.