Ayatollah Khamenie: "Persapolis Is a Throne of Hatred!"

The latest anti-Iranian drivel by the Supreme Leader of Ignorance, Ayatollah Khamenie. This is akin to Americans in 2000 years from now slamming the forefathers of the greates democracy on earth.

Again, thanks to Focus Pocus for translating and bringing this latest travesty to our attention:


"This is a partial translation of Khameni’s latest anti Iranian diatribe in Fars province as recorded by ISNA, Iranian Students News Agency:

The leader of Islamic Republic of Iran, on Wednesday morning and during a gathering with Fars province’s governor and authorities declared that Persepolis or Takht-e-Jamshid is the symbol of tyranny and that it belongs to Iran’s pre Islamic Revolution’s tyrannical rulers and it’s merely a symbol of despotism of the past and it’s a throne of hatred for all true Iranian Moslems who will have to gaze upon its site! If at any point there were any doubts about Islamic Republic’s disdain for Iranians, their culture and their heritage, this should now be adequate proof.Additionally, Khamenei said that the achievements, art and literature of Iran only came to matter after the advent of Islam and Iranians' conversion to the good religion!"

*Persepolis

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Islamic Republic Bullies Lebanon into censorship via Hizballah

Lebanon bans prize-winning cartoon 'Persepolis'
11 hours ago
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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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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An Old Persian text in the Persepolis Fortification Archive

For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian language that shows the written language in use for practical recording and not only for royal display. The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, now at the Oriental Institute at The University of Chicago. The tablet is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity at five villages near Persepolis in about 500 B.C.“Now we can see that Persians living in Persia at the high point of the Persian Empire wrote down ordinary day-to-day matters in Persian language and Persian script,” said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. “Odd as it seems, that comes as a surprise—a very big surprise.”Read the rest

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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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