Documenting social change in Iran

Adrian Smith, Contributor, Jakarta

"The San Andreas fault may run through Hollywood, but the cutting edge of cinema is currently to be found in Iran, whence it sends ripples round the world," writes veteran film critic Philip French. And he's not far off the mark.

Jafar Panahi, who was born in 1960, is one of a wave of recent international award-winning Iranian film directors, who have mesmerized both audiences and critics alike. His movies capture snippets of social reality in a country that is currently wrestling with its own demons.

While many films like to spell things out word for word, Panahi makes his audience work at filling in the gaps. "I am an artist. I am independent. It is for others to decide," he said during a recent interview here in Jakarta, where he had come for the screening of his latest film, The Circle, at the Jakarta International Film Festival.

Of course, this style of filmmaking is also a necessity in a country where artistic output is regulated by state-imposed censorship. "I'm afraid I can't talk about politics, it'll just get me and those I know into trouble," he said.

He speaks from experience. The Circle, despite winning the Golden Bear Award for best film at the Venice Film Festival in 2000, remains banned in his native country.

And fellow Iranian director, Tahmineh Milani, though recently released from prison, is still threatened with execution for her latest film, The Hidden Half.

As Panahi's work attests, censorship sometimes provides a necessary point of resistance, which drives many to the height of their imaginative resources to communicate at various levels.

His international debut, The White Balloon, hit screens worldwide in 1995. It won the Camera D'Or award for the best first film and the International Critics' prize at the Cannes Film Festival that same year.

The story is simple, yet striking. Set in modern-day Tehran, it is about a young girl's determined efforts to successfully retrieve some money, intended to buy a goldfish for Iran's New Year's celebrations, which she has accidentally dropped through a grating on the side of the road.

There is seemingly very little action and little is explained, yet the film's fly-on-the-wall documentary style builds a vivid and evocative picture of what Tehran society is like through the encounters the girl has with passers-by.

The girl is all the more endearing for her uninhibited willfulness, which is so characteristic of children at a certain age.

On her way to the shop she is distracted, and a bystander warns her, "It's not good for girls to watch snake charmers." She retorts simply, "I wanted to see what it was that was not good for me to watch."

As Panahi explained subsequently, the choice of a child was not just to escape the censors, but was a vehicle for him to reflect what he believes to be the youthful spirit of the country. Panahi also took up this theme in his next offering, 1997's The Mirror.

While his first two international successes took a look at a closed society through the eyes of childhood innocence, his latest work, The Circle, deals with an adult issue, namely the position of women in Iranian society.

It follows full circle four women, who begin and end the film in jail. The message: it's a man's world in Tehran and women have the odds stacked against them.

The film itself provides no answers, but it does pose a number of questions: who are the real criminals and where do the boundaries of prison begin and end?

"The government didn't like The Circle because it conflicts with their idea of promoting Iranian society. The film also highlighted and exposed the presence of prostitutes."

As with all his films to date, his understatement proves to be his greatest strength. The things that affect the viewer most are often inconspicuous, undramatic. Images of people longing for a cigarette suggest so much more than what is visually portrayed.

However, the centerpiece of the film is all too obvious: a woman hides behind a car waiting for the police to pick up her abandoned baby, an unwanted female.

"My films depict only moments of truth. It is not true of all Iranian life. I am only drawing from my own experience of what I've seen," Panahi said.

"I want to show pieces of social reality, not simply the culture and customs of Iran but the problems that exist there in everyday life, and to combine that with a high philosophy of life which grounds my films in humanism," Panahi said.

However, as Philip French points out, it is a "form of realism (that) offers no easy answers, it just points to the unfathomable mystery of life".