Justice for Iran

“This Is Not a Film is not a film because its director is not a director. In December 2010, Jafar Panahi of Iran was sentenced to six years in prison and banned for 20 years from making movies. His crime was “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” He was a supporter of the enormous crowds that filled the streets of Tehran to protest the suspicious re-election of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Panahi, who is on camera almost constantly in “This Is Not a Film,” has a trustworthy face. He seems kind and philosophical — especially on this particular day, when he is awaiting a judge’s ruling on his appeal. Alone in a spacious high-rise apartment, except for his daughter’s pet iguana Igi, he has some flatbread and jam for his breakfast, calls his lawyer, is told Iranian judges almost never overturn sentences, but he might hope for a “discount” of the 20 years.

What comes next is an extraordinary act of courage. He has been filming himself, and now calls his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to come over and join him. He’s not sure what to do. Forbidden to even say “action” or “cut,” Panahi wanders about the apartment, feeds the iguana, begins to describe the most recent screenplay he was forbidden permission to film, and comments on the DVDs of three of his films: “The White Balloon” (1995), “The Circle” (2000), and “Crimson Gold” (2003). 

This man, who has been silenced, now finds things in the films he did not plan. In the first, the little girl who is playing his heroine, gets fed up with the process, tears off the cast she’s wearing for the scene and stalks out of camera range. “I’m not acting anymore!” she announces. The second is a drama about the difficulties of a group of women who attempt to move about the city without male companions (chaperones?). The third is about a large, stolid man who loses patience with himself. The actor is in fact schizophrenic (which the film doesn’t mention). He cannot take direction, but spontaneously he makes a gesture with his hands that expresses enormous frustration.

I’ve seen these films, and they are very good. They’ve won awards at many major festivals: Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and so on. I realize my description doesn’t begin to evoke the experience for you. That is precisely Panahi’s point. He demonstrates it in an agonizing scene where he begins to tell his friend the story of his banned film and uses tape on the carpet to mark out the floor plan of his heroine’s room. (She has been accepted by a university but forbidden by her father to attend, and locked in her room). He grows frustrated and tears up the tape.

Things happen. Carry-out food arrives. A neighbor drops off her dog for Panahi to watch, but the dog freaks out at the sight of the iguana. He watches the news on TV. It is Fireworks Wednesday, the Persian New Year’s, and in the evening, the city by tradition will be crowned by fireworks. Ahmadinejad has banned fireworks, murmuring darkly that they are in violation of Islamic law. The film never says the Islamic Republic shows great insecurity in the face of anything it doesn’t control. It doesn’t have to. I would like to show “This Is Not a Film” to those in the United States who are in favor of a close union of church and state.

There is nothing remotely political in Panahi’s films. But they can be read as parables. That is how Iranian directors must work these days. Even a domestic drama like last year’s Oscar-winning “A Separation” can be read in more than one way. And when religious fundamentalists are doing the interpretation, what chance does the human spirit have?

Little by little, detail by detail, “This Is Not a Film” leads to a final scene of overwhelming power. I don’t think it was even planned — no more than Panahi expected the little actress to take the cast off her arm. It simply happens, and then the film is over, having nothing more to say. Because, after all, it is not a film.”

At this time, many young Iranians all over this world are watching us, and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award, or a film or a filmmaker, but because at the time, in talk of war, intimidation and aggressions exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture — a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country. A people who respect all cultures and civilizations, and despise hostility and resentment.

—Iranian film director ASGHAR FARHADI, on accepting his Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, A Separation (via inothernews)

(via kateoplis)

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.”

We would like to formally congratulate Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi. We applaud his achievement; it’s a testament to the richness and the resilience of Persian culture.

—State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland

thepoliticalnotebook:

Iranian actress Marzieh Vafamehr, who was sentenced to 90 lashes and a year in prison for her starring role in the film My Tehran for Sale (trailer above), has been freed. She was apparently released on Monday night, as Amnesty International reported yesterday, after her sentence was overturned in court. The charges were related to the scenes in the controversial movie in which her character drinks, or appears to drink alcohol, and appears without a mandated head covering.

Read the stories at the Guardian and Amnesty International.

standwithfreeiran:

Banned Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Sends a Message in a Bottle with This Is Not a Film

The annals of filmmaking are filled with stories of people who managed to make films against all odds, without money, without shooting permits, without proper professional equipment. This Is Not a Film, or In Film Nist, the 75-minute film directed by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb that has screened here out of competition, may be the ultimate achievement in stealth filmmaking, considering that Panahi is currently serving a six-year jail sentence and has been banned by the Iranian government from making films for 20 years. And yet somehow he has made a movie that has found its way to one of the world’s major film festivals: This Is Not a Film is a small but extremely significant message in a bottle. [Read more]

Urge Iranian authorities to reverse the harsh sentence imposed on Jafar Panahi!

More  Jafar Panahi.

Panahi, who won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1995 for The White Balloon, was convicted of making propaganda against the ruling regime in Iran last December. He was jailed for six years and banned from directing films for 20 years.

A prominent supporter of the protests that followed Iran’s disputed presidential election in 2009, Panahi was arrested for joining in mourning for demonstrators killed in July that year. He was subsequently released but barred from leaving Iran. In February 2010 he was arrested along with his family and colleagues and taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. He was released on bail three months later after starting a hunger strike, but was later convicted of the propaganda offence.

In her best actress acceptance speech at Cannes last year, Juliette Binoche criticised the Iranian regime for holding Panahi. His place on the jury for this year’s Berlin film festival was kept empty in protest at his incarceration. In a similar gesture, Cannes will keep a seat empty in the middle of the orchestra at the Croisette theatre, the screening venue for the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.