Islamic Republic Bullies Lebanon into censorship via Hizballah

Lebanon bans prize-winning cartoon 'Persepolis'
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BEIRUT (AFP) — The Oscar-nominated film "Persepolis", which has annoyed authorities in Iran for its critical portrayal of the Islamic revolution, has been banned in Lebanon, officials said on Wednesday, sparking an outcry.
General Wafiq Jizzini, the head of the general security department at the interior ministry, told AFP he had approved the ban after Shiite officials expressed concern that its content was offensive to Muslims and to Iran.
"The office that handles censorship matters also informed me in their report that the film attacks Islam and the Iranian regime, and this could spark tension with Iran," Jizzini said.

He added that he had not seen the film and that his decision was not final.
"I can go back on my decision, I respect freedom of expression," he said. "But given the current political crisis in Lebanon, this is not the time to add fuel to the fire."
Lebanon has been mired for more than a year in a deep political crisis pitting the Western-backed government against the Hezbollah-led opposition backed by Iran and Syria.
A government official told AFP earlier that Jizzini had decided to ban 'Persepolis' because of his supposed close ties with Hezbollah.
"It is clear that ... General Wafiq Jizzini is close to Hezbollah and he doesn't want to allow such a movie, which he believes gives an image of Iran as being worse off than it was before the shah," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Jizzini said Hezbollah had not influenced his decision.
The ban sparked an outcry in many circles, with some saying it smacked of hypocrisy and showed that some within the Lebanese government were kowtowing to Iran.
Culture Minister Tareq Mitri said he saw no reason why the film should be banned and that he had urged the interior ministry to rescind its decision.
Bassam Eid, production manager at Circuit Empire, the company that was to distribute the film, blasted the ban as ridiculous and unwarranted.
"The decision is even more ridiculous when you consider that you can buy for two dollars pirated copies of the film in Hezbollah's stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut," Eid told AFP.
"I purchased two copies of the film from the suburbs and from the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and handed one over to the culture minister."
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a leading member of the ruling coalition, said he was stunned by "this cultural faux-pas that allows a security service to evaluate artistic and cultural works."
The film, which shows its young heroine's brushes with the authorities in the early days of the Islamic revolution in the 1980s, was screened in Iran last month but is not expected to be shown at mainstream cinemas.
A success in the United States and France, "Persepolis" has been condemned by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government as Islamophobic and anti-Iranian.
The film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar for best animated film, is based on comic strips by Iranian-French emigre Marjane Satrapi.
Co-directed by Satrapi, it shows repression under the shah but also portrays the social crackdown, arrests and executions that followed the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.
The heroine's rebellious nature and conflicts with the authorities force her to leave Iran temporarily for Austria and then for France -- this time never to return.

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Sunday Night Movie Review - Persepolis

Best Review of Persepolis so far:


From Dailykos: By SocprofPersepolis is the animated film by Marjane Satrapi, relating her coming of age in Iran, starting before the fall of the Shah regime to today. The film is divided into several segments:

* Marjane’s childhood in Tehran before the fall of the Shah, in what seems a middle-class family; in that segment, there are a lot of hints at the political repression exercised by the Shah regime against students, left-wingers and any political opposition through the character, especially, of her uncle Anousch.

* The end of her childhood at the time of the Revolution with the irony that the opponents to the Shah end up just as persecuted by the Ayatollahs. The women have wear the veil (nice jab at the stupid idea that a veiled woman is a free woman). Marjane sees her intelligent mother having to humiliate herself before a man just because her headscarf is not properly set. When her uncle Anousch is imprisoned, to be executed by the regime, he asks Marjane to come visit him at the prison for his only allowed visit. This is something that will mark Marjane and make her realize the brutality of the regime.

* The Vienna years: Because of the war with Iraq, Marjane’s parents send her to the French Lycee in Vienna. There, she faces culture shock and homesickness, along with her first lousy love affairs, homelessness and a defeated return home.

* Back to Tehran, the war is over but the situation is even worse than before she left in terms of political repression. Little vignettes show us the daily indignities that women have to endure at the hands of the Guardian of the Revolution. After a bout with depression, as she feels a stranger everywhere, Marjane pulls herself together and becomes an art student, gets married, gets divorced, then moved to Paris.

Don’t be fooled, this is a film where deep and dark reality of political oppression alternates with hilarious moments (and I mean, donkey-braying moments of hilarity). It’s even more funny if you understand French. My favorite funny moments:

* Countless childhood moments
* Marjane and her anarchist friends in Vienna
* Marjane’s body matures
* Marjane reconsiders her newly broken up love affair
* Marjane draws her art teacher at the university as he analyzes a VERY censored version of the Birth of Venus

The voices are wonderfully done by three generations of incredible actresses: the legendary Danielle Darrieux is the grandmother (her swearing is considerably euphemized in the subtitles), the great Catherine Deneuve lends her voice to Marjane’s mother, and Catherine Deneuve’s daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (her father was the great Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni) lends her voice to the adolescent and adult Marjane.

This is first and foremost of women’s story and a feminist film. We can use more of these, these days.

The movie also does a great job at humanizing the Iranians for us. And we can certainly use more of that too. Iran is not one big monolith of Muslim evilness. We should never reduce the country to the regime governing it. In the film, mostly, people try to survive, avoid the state apparatus of repression, from whomever it comes from, the Shah or the Ayatollahs. Women have to constantly make the calculus of dignity or survival, a pretty crappy deal. More than everything else, they try to be happy. They try to outsmart the regimes by having parties where political tensions can be left behind.

I know exactly ZERO about animation but I thought it was incredibly engaging here. It is mostly in black and white, with all shades of grey. There are touches of colors at certain points (no spoiling from me, you’ll have to figure out their significance on your own). The drawing seems simple but the characters are very expressive and black, grey and white seems enough to give substance to everything, especially, the urban landscapes of Tehran and Vienna.

My only disagreement? ABBA is NOT for wimps, they still rock, dammit!

The DVD will join my collection as soon as it’s out.

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Cartoon villains

Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis wins 2007 Cannes Jury Prize)

Guardian:Taking offence seems to be turning in to a full-time occupation in Iran. Just days after being gravely offended by the awarding of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie (an author who, ironically, was honoured by the Iranian literary establishment for his novel, Shame) the mullahs of Tehran have got themselves in a tizzy over the French-produced film version of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis.The Iranian embassy in Thailand has successfully lobbied to have the French animated film withdrawn from the Bangkok International Film Festival.

The director of the festival, Chattan Kunjara na Ayudhya told Reuters, with wonderful diplomacy: "I was invited by the Iranian embassy to discuss the matter and we both came to mutual agreement that it would be beneficial to both countries if the film was not shown. It's a good film, but there are other considerations." The last sentence seems a touch odd coming from the director of a film festival. What could these "other considerations" possibly be, eh?

Payvand Khorsandi's take: Ten years ago the Islamic Republic of Iran, in what many regarded as a charade, 'mulled' barring director Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry from the Cannes film festival. The film went on to become co-winner of the Palme d’Or, arguably buoyed by the publicity Iran’s threatened withdrawal generated.

Ten years on and another Iranian film, this time funded by French money, is co-winner at Cannes of the Jury prize – France ignored the mullahs’ protests and the film was allowed to take part.

The 2007 Bangkok international film festival, which kicks off this month, however, was not so bold. Last month, in a coup for Iran’s Islamist censor, Thai authorities agreed to withdraw Persepolis, the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, from the festival.

“[The filmmakers] tried to make Iranian people sad and upset with the Islamic revolution, which is not true,” a spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Bangkok told AFP last week. (Charmingly, he identified himself only as ‘Mohammed’.)
He added: “We appreciate that the Thai organisers understand, and now we are trying to introduce other good award-winning Iranian films.”

This last statement is worth note because it confirms the fact that the Islamic Republic believes in the PR value of its film output, even if Iranian directors are reluctant to accept they might be acting as facilitators in this regard.

Most are long-dogged by the complaint that they fail to use the high profile afforded by the international festival circuit, to talk about the elephant in the living room of atrocities under the Islamic Republic. Their stock response is that art operates above, or separately from, politics.
But while that’s academic, one thing is clear: Iran’s directors have signed no letter to any newspaper in Marjane Satrapi’s (and co-director Vincent Paronnaud’s) defence, condemning the decision to ban Persepolis in Bangkok.

They must be asked, is the plight of Satrapi’s film a political issue they cannot touch or a simply matter of cinema, the medium they so often, in romantic terms, claim to adore? (“Oh, the lights! How I used, as a boy, to cherish Uncle Hasan projecting Murnau’s Nosferatu onto the side of our house in Tehran for all our neighbours to see. Even Ali the butcher was enthralled by the magic of the lights! Oh, cinema!”)

Satrapi is important because she is one of few Iranian artists operating outside the Persian language sphere, who is scathing about the Islamic Republic and the US government in equal measure, while offering a sophisticated window on the culture of her homeland.
It is still not too late for Iranian film-makers to shoot off a few letters to the press in her defence and get the Thai authorities to overturn the decision to bar the film on the grounds of what the mullahs claim is the 'Islamophobic' thrust of its narrative.

I believe the international film community should boycott the Bangkok film festival and that Iran's acclaimed directors should speak out for Satrapi and Paronnaud. Otherwise we can expect more festivals to follow Bangkok's example and toe the Islamic Republic's line. Comment
-- Blog: Soul Bean Café

NPR: Illustrator Marjane Satrapi

MORE ABOUT MARJANE
In her own words: Read what the author has to say about writing graphic novels and more.
IMAGE GALLERY
Come see some of the details from the pages of Embroideries.
Come see some of the details from the pages of Persepolis 2.
Come see some of the details from the pages of Persepolis.

Persepolis Box Set

Sony Pictures Classics has stills from the upcoming film Persepolis, the animated adaptation of the excellent graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi wrote and directed the film.
A release date has not been scheduled, but it is expected to come out in 2007. Her latest graphic novel, Chicken with Plums, comes out Oct. 3.

Persepolis website

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Summer at the movies

I can't wait to see this film:

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Cannes Films Festival (2007): Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi Co-director, with Vincent Paronnaud, of "Persepolis," Satrapi is the only first-time helmer in Cannes Competition this year. The B&W animated feature about a precocious Iranian girl living in post-Islamic Revolution Tehran is adapted from Satrapi's comicbook memoirs of the same name. Satrapi, who now lives in Paris, has published four "Persepolis" volumes that have sold well over a million copies worldwide. More projects with Paronnaud are in the works.

Trailer-
Persepolis - Teaser 1

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Marjan Sartapi

Author Marjane Satrapi in a recent interview on French television.

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