A Social Introduction to Iranian Cinema (Part 2)

Khomeini’s tacit approval of cinema as an instrument for conducting religious and ethical discourse also allowed for the reestablishment of the film industry following a quiet period, now with an entirely new (and constantly shifting) set of censorship guidelines and the oversight of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The scholar Goli M. Rezai-Rashti wrote, "On the one hand regulations introduced by the government restricted foreign films (especially Hollywood movies) in an effort to purify the public space, inadvertently strengthening indigenous filmmaking; an increasing number of feature films were produced in Iran…On the other hand, the state placed different forms of restriction and political/cultural censorship on those involved in filmmaking" (191).

In other words, it is difficult to summarize the paradoxical position of today’s Iranian filmmaker. On the one hand, he or she is encouraged to point out incidences of institutionalized inequality, to criticize social injustice, to force the audience to identify with the subjectivity of the underprivileged and the oppressed; yet, at the same time, there are muddied boundaries that must not be crossed, lest the filmmaker commit (real or imagined) sedition against the state or religious authority. Censorship has become paroxysmal in the new regime of the “democratically elected” Mahmood Ahmadinejad, which has further restricted the ability of filmmakers to criticize the government or stray from a normative moral framework (often corresponding, unsurprisingly enough, with political authority). Several filmmakers have been imprisoned, while others have been banned from making films or saddled with other exorbitant penalties for expressing some imagined attack on Ahmadinejad’s regime.

It is in this difficult context, however, that thousands of filmmakers are trained every year and over 100 films are officially financed. The critical appraisal and international reception of Iranian cinema has grown as well; by the end of the 1980s, Iranian cinema became a fixture at international film festivals and art houses around the world, winning several prestigious awards and critical acclaim, followed by the top awards of Europe’s three most important film festivals in the 90s and 2000s: the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry;

the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival for Jafar Panahi’s The Circle;

and, most recently, the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.

References

Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. “Transcending the Limitations: Women and the Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16.2 (2007): 191-206.