Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from Iran and Turkey: 2nd Edition

Cinemas of the Other:

A Personal Journey with Film-makers from Iran and Turkey

2nd Edition

Cinemas of the Other:

A Personal Journey with Film-makers from Iran and Turkey

2nd Edition

by Gönül Dönmez-Colin

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2012 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2012 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2012 Gönül Dönmez-Colin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Typesetting: John Teehan

ISBN 978-1-84150-548-0

EISBN 978-1-84150-765-1

Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

IRAN

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

The Hidden Half

Bahram Beyza’i

The Other Side of the Story

Abolfazl Jalili

Treading the Thin Line: Fiction as Documentary

Mahmud Kalari

Valuable Lessons of Camera

Abbas Kiarostami

Life and Nothing But…

Reality Without Interruption

Majid Majidi

Refugees in Love and Life

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Portrait of the Revolutionary as an Artist: Take One

Take Two

Dariush Mehrjui

From Social Realism to Dramas of the Interior

Tahmineh Milani

The Real Identity of Women

Jafar Panahi

A Place of their Own

TURKEY

Kutluğ Ataman

As Many Centres as Individuals

Handan İpekçi

Hidden Faces

Semih Kaplanoğlu

Fragments From Life in Reverse

Erden Kıral

Exile’s Return

Many Faces of Truth

Settling of Accounts

A Question of Conscience

Ali Özgenturk

Film-maker in Times of Strife: A Journey into Self

Nostalgia for True Love

Tayfun Pirselimoğlu

New Voices Raising Old Concerns

Portraits from the Periphery

Yeşim Ustaoğlu

Taboos Can Also Be Broken

The Journey of Unlikely Souls

Who am I?

Pandora’s Box

Atıf Yılmaz Batıbeki

Whose is the Gaze?

Film Credits

Selected Bibliography

for Maya, Inés and Phyllis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to all film-makers who participated in this project, which would not have been possible without the generous contribution of their time and sincere and open sharing of their work, ideas, feelings and dreams. Special thanks are due to film festivals that focus on the lesser-known cinemas of the world, making it possible to view films that are not otherwise available, particularly, festival des 3 continents – Nantes, Cottbus Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Istanbul International Film Festival and Vesoul International Festival of Asian Cinemas.

Introduction

Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-Makers from the Middle East and Central Asia is a collection of interviews with film-makers whose works are representative of the cinemas of their respective countries.

Cinema worldwide is dominated by the Hollywood film industry, which imposes its culture, values and cinematic gaze although its contribution is no more than a fraction of the annual production worldwide. National and regional cinemas/industries that cannot fight such an economically powerful giant have either withdrawn backstage or have begun to adopt the box-office success formula of the adversary. The ‘other’ in the title has a dual meaning: (1) the non-western nations of the Islamic Middle East and Central Asia that are commonly perceived from a Eurocentric point of view as a distinctly separate entity – remote, alien, mysterious, exotic, barbaric, savage and even threatening and dangerous – (2) the cinemas of these nations, which are committed to voicing the social and political issues of their peoples, and/or oppose, both in style and content, dominant mainstream cinemas, inside and outside the country.

To examine the cinemas of all countries that could be defined as ‘the other’ in this sense is beyond the scope of this book and also my expertise. I have chosen Iran and Turkey from the Middle East, the two non-Arab Muslim countries in the region, which were never colonized and the Muslim Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which share several common traits – history, customs, traditions, languages and religious affiliation – with Iran and Turkey. For the second edition in paperback, we have decided to divide the two parts of the book into two separate volumes to make room for new additions and to provide easier access to readers with different interests. Hence, Volume One is focused on Iran and Turkey, whereas Volume Two concentrates on the Muslim Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. Naturally, the list of distinguished film-makers from these regions is not confined to those included here. Several other film-makers have already taken their deserved place in some of my other books.

The evolution of cinema in Iran and Turkey has been similar in several ways, and carries certain common elements – it’s assimilation as a western non-Muslim invention, it’s adoption or rejection, the forms of censorship imposed that arise from religious beliefs and the position of women as images and as image-makers. Other aspects are universal and related to geopolitical, social and economic circumstances and not necessarily religion.

Iranian cinema has had its roots in a popular art form called pardeh-khani – akin to Benshi of the Japanese silent cinema, which involves a narrator recounting a story around a painting. A similar art form, nagali, was performed in the ghahve-khanes (coffee-houses) that were the main venues for cultural interaction.

The first Iranian non-fiction film was shot in Ostend, Belgium, on 18th August 1900 by Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, the official court photographer, who used a Gaumont camera to record the ceremony welcoming the visiting Shah with bouquets of flowers. The first public screenings were held in Cinema Soleil, opened in 1900 in Tabriz by Roman Catholic missionaries, and commercial viewings were started by Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi-e Tehrani, first at the back of his antique shop and later, in 1904, in a cinema in Tehran. However, it took almost a quarter of a century for ordinary women to experience cinema and then, only in segregated sections.

Abi va rabi/Abi and Rabi (1930), a black-and-white silent film, directed by Ovanes Ohanian, is considered the first ever Iranian film. Abdolhossein Sepanta’s very popular Dokhtar-e Lor/The Lor Girl (1933), shot in India, featuring a rural girl named Golonar who sang and danced in the teahouses on the Lorestan-Khuzistan road was the first sound film and the first film featuring a Muslim woman on screen. For many years, Iranian cinema was inundated with cheap imitations of Indian films, which showed women as gullible creatures. Such films that came to be labelled as film farsi alienated the families.

During the time of the imperial regime, both the government and the religious authorities aimed at controlling the images shown publicly. Censorship began in the 1920s when imported films dealing openly with sex were seen as a threat to the family. Political or social criticism was unthinkable in local films. By the 1950s and 1960s, censorship of political content tightened, whereas sex had a free rein. The clerics, on the other hand, condemned cinema, along with music and other art forms, as immoral and corrupt and, therefore, haram (forbidden). Abolfazl Jalili’s autobiographical film, Abjad/ The First Letter (2003), elaborates remarkably the stifling religious oppression of the arts even before the revolution.

The credit for laying the foundations of Iranian new wave (moj-e no), a movement that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, goes to Forugh Farrokhzad, a rebel poet. Khaneh Siyah Ast/The House is Black (1962), a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony (a fitting metaphor for the Iranian socio-political atmosphere) is acknowledged as the most important influence on contemporary Iranian cinema. The film’s delicate fusion of poetry with actuality and the use of non-professional actors are precursors of the works of several celebrated Iranian film-makers, particularly Abbas Kiarostami.

In 1970, Dariush Mehrjui’s first film, Gav/The Cow, about a peasant who goes mad after losing his cow and identifies with the animal was heralded as cinéma verité. One of the most influential film-makers of the new wave was Sohrab Shahid Saless, who emigrated to the West after Yek Ettefaghe Sadeh/A Simple Event (1973) and Tabiate Bijan/Still Life (1974).

The new regime of the Ayatollahs was not against cinema as such. Khomeni called it ‘one of the achievements of civilisation’, however, starting from 1978, the fervour of the revolutionaries resulted in arson attacks on more than 180 movie houses killing hundreds of people. Many film-makers were indicted on charges of corrupting the public. Several prominent ones chose exile. The attempts to establish an Islamist cinema brought the film industry under the control of the government. Most of the repressive measures were related to the depiction of women on the screen – no close-ups, no women protagonists, no appearance of the female gender over nine years of age without the hejab (Islamic dress code), no tactual contact between unrelated members of the opposite sex, and so on. Women were erased from the screen unless they served the purpose of role models as dutiful and obedient wives, mothers and daughters. Innovative film-makers began to re-structure their scripts, using children as actors to avoid urban adult stories.

In the 1980s, when President Mohammad Khatami was the Minister of Islamic Guidance and Culture, he declared that cinema ‘was not the mosque’. With the founding of the Farabi Cinema Foundation in 1983, positive steps were taken to liberate the arts from the clutches of the clerics and promote national cinema; Iranian films began to be noticed in the West. With Abbas Kiarostami, Bahram Beyza’i, Dariush Mehrjui and Mohsen Makhmalbaf leading the way, and with several younger talented film-makers, such as Abolfazl Jalili, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi, not to forget established women film-makers like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Tahmineh Milani, who paved the way for young talents like Samira Makhmalbaf, Iranian cinema has become one of the most vibrant and challenging cinemas of the Middle East. However, restrictive government policies, lack of freedom and systematic human rights abuses have seriously handicapped filmmakers. In 2010, the multiple-award-winner Jafar Panahi (Badkonak-e sefid/The White Balloon, 1995; Ayneh/The Mirror, 1997; Dayareh/The Circle, 2000; Offside, 2006) was jailed on charges of conspiracy against the government. In December of the same year, he was condemned to six years in prison with a ban on making films, giving interviews and leaving the country for 20 years. Bahman Ghobadi (Zamani baraye masti ashbha/A Time for Drunken Horses, 2000; Turtles Can Fly, 2004; Niwemang/Half Moon, 2006; Kasi az Gorbehaye Irani Khabar Nadareh/No One Knows About Persian Cats, 2009) was originally encouraged to make films about the Kurds following the ethnic policy of the government, but later on, was barred from working in Iran. The Makhmalbaf family has shifted their base to other countries, and Abbas Kiarostami has attended the Cannes film festival 2010 with a production shot in Italy. Nonetheless, the young generation persists in continuing the rich film tradition despite all odds. Asghar Farhadi, who had won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival with Darbareye Elly/About Elly in 2009, received the Golden Bear for Best Film in 2011 with his family drama, Jodaeiye Nader az Simin/Nader and Simin: A Separation.

It has been established that cinema was introduced in Turkey in 1896 by a Frenchman named Bertrand. His private show at the palace of Sultan Abdulhamit II was followed by public screenings at the fashionable Sponeck Restaurant in Pera, in the cosmopolitan European part of Istanbul, by a Romanian named Sigmund Weinberg, who was the local agent of the French company Pathé Brothers. In 1908, Weinberg opened the first movie theatre in the same district and appropriately called it Cinema Pathé. The district eventually changed its name to Beyoğlu but remained the centre of the film industry and a particular street called Yeşilçam (The Green Pine) gave its name to a Turkish Hollywood, which was the dominant form of entertainment until the spread of television in the 1970s.

Alexandre Promio, the cameraman of the Lumiére brothers, shot short films about Turks in 1896 in Istanbul, and the Macedonian Manaki brothers Yanaki and Militiades started making documentaries in 1907. Aya Stefanos’taki Rus Abidesinin Yıkılısı/The Demolition of the Russian Monument at St. Stephan, a documentary assumed to be made in 1914 by Fuat Uzkınay, an officer in the Turkish army, is considered the first national film although evidence to substantiate its existence is lacking.

The shooting of what the historians consider the first feature film, Himmet Ağanın İzdivacı/The Marriage of Himmet Aga, a free adaptation from Moliére, was begun by Sigmund Weinberg in 1918 but was suspended due to war and completed two years later by Fuat Uzkınay. The following year, a leading figure of theatre, Ahmet Fehim, made waves with a sex-vaudeville about a French seductress called Angelique, which was adapted from a novel by a well-known Turkish novelist, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar. Mürebbiye/The Governess (1919) was banned by the commandant of the occupying French forces for degrading French women.

As in Iran, cinema began as entertainment for men by men. Armed fundamentalists occupied the theatres and threatened to knife any woman who dared to enter. Special screenings were arranged for women or the halls were partitioned with a wooden board until Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey decreed an end to segregation. Women waited even longer to become actors. Until the founding of the secular Turkish Republic in 1923, all female roles were played by non-Muslims.

Early Turkish cinema often depicted women (perhaps as a pretext to display the female body provocatively) as ‘fallen’ – prostitutes disguised under the euphemism of dancing girls and cabaret singers. Village maidens lost their virginity because of moral weakness or rape or were left without protection owing to the death of the husband or the desertion of the lover and became a threat to the honour of the family and a disgrace to Muslim society. Even when they were not responsible for the fall, the stigma attached to their condition did not change.

Until the 1940s, Turkish cinema was dominated by one man, Muhsin Ertuğrul, a foreign-educated theatre director who was deeply influenced by French and German theatres and the Soviet revolutionary cinema. Ertuğrul’s Ateşten Gömlek/The Shirt of Fire (1923) is a landmark as the first film to cast Muslim women, breaking a long-established taboo. The period between 1923 and 1939, which is referred to as the Period of Theatre Men, is also important for the establishment of severe censorship laws, inspired by Mussolini’s Codice di Censura, which remained in effect for almost 50 years.

Turkish cinema began to show interest in rural life in the 1940s with folkloric melodramas focusing on the theme of the oppressed woman. By the late 1940s, the municipal tax on cinema tickets was reduced by half for Turkish productions. This first subsidy coincided with the emergence of a new generation of film-makers and a noticeable rise in film production. Some of the leading film-makers of modern Turkish cinema, Lütfi Akad, Metin Erksan, Memduh Ün and Atıf Yılmaz, had their formation in those years.

Owing to political changes, cinema’s place in the lives of people also changed. During the populist party regime and the internal migration of the 1950s, films began to be chosen for the masses. Going to the cinema was no longer a social event for the elite class. The commercial Yeşilçam cinema born in this period reflects such popularism. The ‘othering’ of the West was an important element in Yeşilçam melodramas although its position was rather ambivalent. The social class that represented the West (usually the Istanbulites) was shown as corrupt, but their lifestyle was the ultimate object of desire.

The cinema of the 1960s was fundamentally influenced by social and political changes in the country, particularly the coup d’etat of 27 May 1960, which seemed to bring a more relaxed atmosphere that nourished the arts. Translations of diverse ideologies, including Marxism-Leninism, became readily available. More books were published and more films were made, particularly in the socialist-realist genre. In 1966, a record 238 films were made. However, this did not necessarily mean they were all worthy of attention. Popular cinema and arabesque melodramas also gained ground and sitcoms, thrillers, religious films, westerns, adaptations from photo-romans and soft-porn films inundated the screens.

Before the arrival of television in 1968, cinema had an important place in the family. Cheap, morning matinees for women were very popular. When the television and the subsequent video furore threatened the industry, many film companies began to churn out cheap sex and kung fu films.

Yılmaz Güney’s Umut/Hope (1970) is considered a turning point heralding the beginning of New Turkish Cinema. The story of a phaeton driver (a trade which became obsolete with the arrival of the taxi system), the film is a realistic portrayal of Turkey in a period of transition to capitalism. Hope was banned for allegedly propagating class differences in a country where officially there were no classes; for alluding to American imperialism; for degrading religion and for provoking workers to resist authority.

The international reputation of Yılmaz Güney is built around two important films that he scripted while in prison and trusted his assistants to direct: Zeki Ökten for Sürü/The Herd (1979) and Şerif Gören for Yol/The Way (1982). Both film-makers were influenced by the new cinema of Güney and were ready for changes despite having spent several productive years within the confines of the commercial cinema system of Yeşilçam. The Herd focuses on the disintegration of nomadic life and the patriarchal structure as a result of changes in the economic structure. When placed in liminal positions, women are at a double disadvantage although feudal oppression destroys men and women alike. Women and honour are important issues in The Way, one of the masterpieces of Turkish cinema, a film that is constructed around the stories of five prisoners on parole. ‘A society where women are not free cannot be free’ asserts Güney’.

In the 1970s, when migration to the city intensified, cinema with a strong religious ideology and morals surfaced to counteract the trashy commercial cinema, the porn furore and the engagé films of the left. The movement re-surfaced in the 1990s under the banner of beyaz cinema (white cinema) and Yücel Çakmaklı’s Minyeli Abdullah/Abdullah of Minye (1990) had a large box-office success. Mesut Uçakan’s Yalnız Değilsiniz/You Are Not Alone (1990), a flagrant religious propaganda about the headscarf issue, was also very popular, appealing mostly to young women caught between modernity and tradition, although its sequels did not receive the same response. White cinema claimed that since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, cinema in general has served negative aims instead of directing the youth to positive channels and women were treated in a manner similar to the period of cahiliyye, pre-Islamic Arabia (as the lowest of all creatures, even below animals according to the Qur’an). However, far from trying to find a solution to women’s problems, white cinema only showed them as binary opposites or stereotypes.

The 1980 coup d’etat, which plunged the country into the dark ages, paradoxically benefited cinema. The absence of the pressure to be politically engaged liberated the artists, and the urban problems of the individual surfaced. The cinema, which had taken its inspiration from the rural cinema of Güney depended on events rather than on individuals. The rural image was somewhat incomplete in mirroring Anatolian realities. The commercial Yeşilçam, which represented Turkish cinema until the end of 1970s, was largely a popular cinema that supported rural culture and oral traditions. Structured on a system of hierarchy that supported the tradition of apprentice–master, it did not permit diverse opinions or expressions. The advent of television, the gradual multiplication of channels and the changes in the social and political environment eased the way for a personal cinema. Along with Ömer Kavur, who is considered the authentic auteur of Turkish cinema, Ali Özgentürk and Erden Kıral are the major representatives of this transition from the politically committed neo-realistic trend to a more creative and personal cinema.

Long years of economic and political turmoil forced thousands of Turkish citizens into exile and some film-makers, such as Erden Kıral, chose self-imposed exile when they could no longer make films in their country. Kıral worked in Germany for many years, but succeeded in using foreign capital to make what he calls ‘Turkish films’.

Feminism arrived rather late in Turkey, but as an increasing number of women began to join the workforce, the focus of cinema shifted from men to women. The films of Atıf Yılmaz best display the general evolution of Turkish cinema, insofar as issues of women are concerned, from infertility, birth control, widowhood to feminism and even lesbianism.

In the 1990s, a new vitality generated by a handful of talented young film-makers – Derviş Zaim, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Semih Kaplanoğlu and Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, to name a few – could be observed. What eventually came to be known as New Turkish Cinema displayed a healthy diversity in terms of genres, styles and subject matter, although the issue of social, political, ethnic and sexual identity in a rapidly changing world has remained the dominant theme. The advancement of political Islam endorsing conservative lifestyles dictated by Islamic ideology and Muslim identity on the one hand, and the capitalist modernity, embracing western cultural, political and economic hegemony, culminating in a strong desire to join the European Union on the other are contributing factors to the urgency felt by the artists to investigate past traumas, collective memory and the dilemmas of a society contesting its identity in a period of transition.

The post-1990s film-makers converge in choosing issues familiar to them, elaborate on characters they know and events they have experienced, realistically or vicariously. The recent past and the present political situation are some of the target issues. Ordinary people caught in daily problems constitute the heroes or the anti-heroes. Solid scripts are usually penned by the director, but often leave room for improvisation. What is most important is the honesty and sincerity in the way they tell their stories. The younger generation (Reha Erdem, İnan Temelkuran, Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun, Pelin Esmer, Aslı Özge, Özer Kızıltan, Hüseyin Karabey) is more political in tackling the issues of social, economic or ethnic inequalities or religious uncertainties. On the other hand, the trend to counteract the hegemony of Hollywood by imitating it (Çağan Irmak, Serdar Akar, Yılmaz Erdoğan, Cem Yılmaz) has been very successful in reviving the film industry and in the 2000s Turkey has become the second country in the world (after India), where local films are more successful at the box office than the Hollywood blockbusters. In 2010, Turkish films took 53% of the total admission.

In the last decade, political and economical developments around the world have reshaped and challenged the old paradigms of ‘national cinema’. The established national identities of cinematic tradition have begun to dissolve, giving way to an alternative criteria for defining identity. A Fatih Akın film may receive an award in Germany as the best German film and in Turkey as the best Turkish film. A number of terms have been employed to conceptualize cinema beyond the boundaries of the nation state such as transnational cinema, which responds to the emergence within international cinema of a considerable body of work that involves co-production across national borders. A large number of Turkish films of the new millennium are in fact transnational films. In addition to utilising funds from sources outside Turkey, some use foreign actors, whereas some others use a Turkish cast and crew but by a foreign director.

Within the national borders, ‘other’ voices have begun to be heard. A good example is the rise of Kurdish cinema with the easing of some of the restrictions in Turkey (such as the lifting of the official ban on Kurdish language) and in Iran, despite all obstacles. After the founding of the Turkish Republic and during the nation-building process, the ethno-religious diversity of Turkey was ‘othered’, defined as ‘Oriental-ness’ by the westernized elite and Turkish cinema has followed this policy exploiting Kurdish characters and the geography of their homeland with an orientalizing gaze. Inside Turkey, Kazım Öz (Fotograf/The Photograph, 2001; Demsala dawi: Sewaxan/The Last Season: Shawaks, 2009) and Hüseyin Karabey (Gitmek/My Marlon and Brando, 2007), and from the diaspora, among others, Miraz Bezar (Min Dit/Ben Gördüm/The Children of Diyarbakır, 2009) who have won several international awards are determined to reverse the gaze. Their cinema counteracts the officially sanctioned films about Kurds, such as Mahsun Kırmızıgül’s Güneşi Gördüm/I Saw the Sun (2009), a box-office hit. The attempts of cinema to break the barriers of ‘national identity’ to embrace ‘cultural identity’ are positive moves in a nation with several distinct cultures, each one unique with its own history, myth and ritual.

While conducting the interviews, several film-makers from different countries have expressed similar concerns regarding culture and cinema in a postmodern age. Erden Kıral and Ali Özgentürk from Turkey, Dariush Mehrjui from Iran and Chingiz Aitmatov from Kyrgyzstan lamented the loss of values in consumer-oriented societies where intellectuals are either shunned or pushed to the margins. Kazakh Rachid Nugmanov and Iranian Abbas Kiarostami converged on the search for nothingness through Japanese haiku poetry. The future of cinema, which was one of the main topics of concern during its 100th birthday, is now linked to the acceptance of new technologies, although with reservations. Several menaces were identified as threatening national film industries: Hollywood dominance, economical limitations, state censorship, but also, the increasingly powerful network of film festivals and funding/distribution systems of the West that have begun to shape national products according to the tastes of western audiences, creating artificial products that do not have an audience in their own country.

This project took off in the early 1990s. To conduct the interviews with film-makers from the Middle East and Central Asia, I have travelled from Kazakhstan to Canada via Iran, Turkey and several other countries along the way, participating in film events where it would be possible to screen the films and meet the film-makers. For the second edition, I have updated the bio/filmographies of the film-makers and have added more recent interviews. Most of the additions are in the Turkey section to respond to a new vitality that has been manifest in Turkish cinema in the last decade, which could not have been ignored. In addition to Grand Prix and Best Actor(s) for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak/ Distant in 2003, Best Director for Üç Maymun/Three Monkeys in 2008 and Grand Prix for Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da/Once Upon a Time in Anatolia in 2011 at the Cannes Film Festival and Golden Bear for Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Bal/Honey in 2010 at the Berlin Film Festival, Turkish films have been winning top awards at prestigious world film festivals, which have been organizing panoramas and retrospectives of Turkish cinema.

Each interview begins with direct questions discussing the film(s) screened most recently, leading to more general topics, such as the cinema of the country in question. In addition to artistic concerns, an integral part of the interview is to place the film-makers and their work within the socio-economic and political context of their environment. Personal questions are broached only if they are relevant to the work. In several cases, the precarious situation of the film-makers in their countries, their personal feelings and/ or the government censorship and restrictions had to be considered before formulating questions.

I have tried to maintain a universal approach and a style that is not overly academic, to widen the readership to include the general public, interested in discovering less-known territories. To avoid redundancy, I chose to divert from a single pattern. Although my questions were prepared in advance with meticulous research, the circumstances and the atmosphere of the interview as well as the personality (and the mood) of the interviewee often led to improvisations. Some interviews took place in a rather formal fashion, whereas others resemble conversations between old friends. In fact, several film-makers who participated have become friends over the years.

The interviews stretch over a decade, which I feel is enriching in terms of following trends, themes and overriding concerns from a chronological point of view. When the same film-maker is presented at intervals, it becomes more challenging to observe the evolution of the artist.

The book aims at familiarizing the reader – academicians, film studies students as well as laymen – with the cinemas of the region, through first-hand accounts from the film-makers regarding historical and recent developments and trends, and by paying particular attention to political and cultural evolutions, with the eventual desired outcome of opening, without compromise, the ‘otherness’ of the ‘other’ to culminate in a better understanding that overcomes clichés, stereotypes and founded or imagined fears.

IRAN

RAKHSHAN BANI-ETEMAD

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is somewhat of an oddity for Iranian cinema: she is a woman; she does not make children’s films; and she pushes the cinematographic limits of her country by focusing on taboo subjects such as poverty, crime, prostitution, polygamy, divorce, repressed feelings, illicit love and similar realities of social existence. The leading woman film-maker of Iran, Bani-Etemad has been making socially engaged documentaries since the late 1970s. She has also excelled in feature films.

Iranian film critics were harsh on her first three features: Karezhj Az Mahdudeh/Off the Limits (1988), Zard-e Ghanari/Yellow Canary (1989) and Pool-e Khareji/Foreign Currency (1990), comedies with a sharp eye for social satire. They saw a young artist keen on entering the profession of cinema, but did not find any differentiating features except perhaps a sense of solidarity with the underprivileged. Scripts written by others did not give her much chance to display her woman’s point of view.

With Nargess (1992), which was based on research she conducted for several years while making documentaries, Bani-Etemad began to focus on adult relationships and problems facing women and questioned the traditional mores of society. The story revolved around two women from different backgrounds and of different age involved with the same man. The film placed relationships in a traditional society in transition to modernity within their apposite cultural and political perspectives. Through the medium of social melodrama, Nargess pushed the censorship codes of an Islamist fundamentalist regime to the limit by exposing marginal characters caught in un-Islamic circumstances. The final sequence of the film, despite the inevitable tragedy, also suggested the possibility and challenge of women’s solidarity. For Bani-Etemad, Nargess was the story of ‘desperate people overwhelmed by social conditions, among them are women who are under dual pressure due to traditional and historical beliefs’.

Her next work, Rusariye Abi/The Blue Veiled (1995), explored the possibilities of forbidden love – an extramarital liaison between a young factory worker and a much older widower of means. When there is a will, there is a way and, particularly, if the hero is as strong-minded as Nobar who refuses to know ‘her place’. The film received the Bronze Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival.

Banoo-e Ordibehesht/The May Lady (1998) is about the tribulations of a 42-year-old divorcée caught between motherhood and womanhood in a society where values are constantly changing. The protagonist, Forough Kia, is a film-maker assigned to shoot a television documentary on the subject of the perfect Iranian mother. Her name sets the tone of the story: first name, Forough, evokes Forough Farrokhzad, a pioneer film-maker (The House is Black, 1962) and a talented poet whose unconventional approach to life and art has inspired and influenced intellectuals and artists, especially women, and Kia is homage to Abbas Kiarostami, whose films carry a documentary quality.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

Forough is a well-educated, urban middle-class single mother who tries to find her own space between the demands of her lover and the possessive tendencies of her adolescent son. The woman in her yearns for an adult relationship, but such feelings are not well received by her outwardly modern son, who assumes the traditional role of the male member of the family, responsible for protecting the female member, regardless of her age or status.

We watch Forough and her son Mani go through their daily routines. She cleans and cooks nonchalantly while arranging business affairs on the cordless telephone. He acts like a typical adolescent – perhaps not so typical for Iran as perceived in the West. This modern boy in blue jeans hangs out with peers and listens to loud western music in his room, the decoration of which is no different than the room of any western adolescent of the same social standing. He even attends a western-style party. However, he is arrested for his transgression, and that is a warning signal that all has not changed in Iran yet. Furthermore, a patronizing magistrate blames the mother and her divorced status for lack of parental discipline.

The May Lady portrays the life of an intelligent modern urban woman, a theme, which had not been dealt with so realistically in post-revolution Iranian cinema. The objective camera of the documentarian is quite evident. The video footage of the interviews the protagonist conducts with mothers from all echelons of society displays effectively the disparity in lifestyles between lower and upper economic classes and the gap between urban and rural conditions. The most commendable aspects of the film, however, are the poetic undertones and the intimate quality of the protagonist’s inner monologues.

Ms Bani-Etemad answered my questions during the Montreal World Film Festival in 1998 where The May Lady was shown in competition. Mohammad Atebbai, film critic and producer, was the interpreter.

THE HIDDEN HALF

Most post-revolutionary Iranian films that reach the West involve children. Very rarely, we see an Iranian film tackling adult situations, let alone the deep concerns of women. Yet, you have made three consecutive feature films, Nargess, The Blue Veiled and The May Lady, which focus on adult relationships and problems facing women.

A large number of Iranian films deal with children, particularly films that are promoted at international film festivals, but I cannot say that this is the norm for all Iranian films. I brought up two children and yet my films never had anything to do with children. The May Lady is an image of contemporary life in Iran, and it reflects