Iranian Filmmakers In Jeopardy

Kris Slava
April, 2012 

Government persecution of Iranian filmmakers is nothing new, but the stakes have ratcheted up in the last year. Jafar Panahi’s un-documentary This Is Not A Film premiered in September at Toronto.  The acclaimed Panahi, is under house arrest and forbidden to make a film for 20 years. 

After filmmakers rallied behind an group of arrested British documentarians, the Ministry of Culture  declared the independent and influential House of Cinema guild illegal in November. Meanwhile A Separation, which would ultimately win both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award was being criticized as anti-Islamic. 

Ironically, the state itself is responsible for the flowering of what many believe is the most vibrant national cinema in the world today. In the wake of the great Islamic revolution of 1979, the new theocratic republic banned American films. 

Although the number of Iranian films produced plummeted immediately after the revolution and established filmmakers fled, the lack of American product caused the Iranian film industry to rebound within a few years.  The rapid growth of domestic cinema gave rise to a new generation of directors, both male and female, and in the 1990’s this new generation began winning widespread international acclaim. 

The truth is, few of the feted Iranian films of the last 20 years are anything near anti-government or anti-Islamic. (Panahi’s current non-film being a notable exception.)  But the government seems uninterested in the truth, and as long as officials continue to prefer their own paranoid perceptions to reality, Iranian filmmakers are in jeopardy.   

Hollywood Voices Support for Imprisoned Iranian Filmmaker Jafar Panahi

Alex Ben Block
The Hollywood Reporter, October 19, 2011 

AMPAS, SAG and ACE are among the groups decrying the director's six-year jail sentence, which was recently upheld by an appeals court.

In the wake of news Wednesday that an Iranian appeals court has upheld a six-year jail sentence and 20-year filmmaking and travel ban against acclaimed film director Jafar Panahi, a number of top U.S. entertainment industry organizations and guilds have come out strongly in his support.

They are also decrying the fate of other filmmakers in Iran who have been imprisoned, harassed or who face government barriers to their freedom of expression. Read more… 

Iranian Cinema Under Seige

22nd Annual Festival of Films from Iran - Cancels Films

Final Whistle - Cancelled

From the Gene Siskal Film Festival Website:

Substitutions in our programming for the Festival of Films from Iran have been necessitated by Iranian government bans on two of our scheduled titles, FINAL WHISTLE and ABSOLUTELY TAME IS A HORSE. A third film, HERE WITHOUT ME, has withdrawn from the festival.  Festival site

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb One of Filmmakers Arrested in Iran

Julian Buckeridge
atthecinema.net, September 21, 2011

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, the co-director of Jafar Pahahi’s This is Not A Film, is among the six filmmakers who were arrested by Iranian authorities on September 17th.

…The imprisoned filmmakers are Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Katayoun Shahabi, Hadi Afarideh, Naser Safarian, Shahnam Bazdar and Mohsen Shahrnazdar.

Earlier this month, Iran barred Mojtaba Mirtahmasb from accompanying This Is Not a Film, which he and Panahi shot secretly on an iPhone and smuggled into France for its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, to the Toronto International Film Festival. Read more…

Women Standouts in Film

Kris Slava
March, 2012 

In a previous issue of JUST we cited reports that the percentage of female directors in Hollywood fell drastically in 2011 from 7% to 5%.  Despite that, female directors continue to make a significant impact.  2011/12 has brought some notable, and meaningful accolades.   

This year’s Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject went to Pakistani Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and her co-director Daniel Junge, for their film Saving Face. The film is about plastic surgeons trying to help Pakistani women who have been the victims of acid attacks by spurned lovers or vindictive husbands. 

Since Obaid-Chinoy is the first Pakistani to receive an Oscar, this helps insure that the film will not be discounted inside Pakistan. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani declared that Obaid-Chinoy will get a civil award for her accomplishment. Chinoy previously won an International Emmy Award for her documentary Pakistan’s Taliban Generation.

At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Lebanese Director/Actor Nadine Labaki received the Cadillac People’s Choice Award for Where Do We Go Now?, a dramatic fable about the difficulties of Christians and Muslims coexisting in a small village. Labaki takes a surprising, playful approach to her serious subject matter.  The women of the village stop at nothing to defuse their men, even resorting to hashish and Ukranian strippers.

Watch for both films– Saving Face will be shown on HBO in March and Where Do We Go Now? will be screened at New York’s New Directors/New Films and be released theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics.

Nadine Labaki: The Rising Star of Lebanese Cinema

Al Arabiya News
September 30, 2011

Flush with the triumph of her latest film at the Toronto International Film Festival, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki is the toast of the town as she sits in a Beirut cafe giving interview after interview.

The movie “Where Do We Go Now?”, about a group of women determined to prevent the men in their village from getting involved in a religious war, won best picture at the festival's People’s Choice Award, seen as a bellwether for Oscar success. Read more…

Saving Face: Pakistan’s Golden Moment

The Express Tribune
February 27, 2012

For Pakistan, 2012 could not have started on a sweeter note. If Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy scoring an Academy Award nomination for her documentary Saving Face in the category of Best Documentary (Short Subject) wasn’t good enough, then her getting to take home the Oscar this Sunday night at the 84th Academy Awards presentation, definitely was. With the entire nation rejoicing at her victory, it seemed she had won the Oscar for all of Pakistan. Read more…

Saving Faces

Sheryl WuDunn - Half the Sky

Female Directors With a Mission

Kris Slava
Februrary, 2012

It's ironic that a recent study discovered that since Katheryn Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director, the percentage of major films by women directors has actually decreased – from seven to five percent. 

Even if you did believe that men make better films than women, it seems patently impossible that men are on average twenty times better at making films than women, as these statistics suggest. The most likely explanation is that there is a highly impenetrable celluloid ceiling, and that is sad.

This study hit the media just as we were researching several very interesting and socially conscious films by women directors that have caught media attention lately.

Never Sorry, Alison Klayman’s  first documentary is about Ai Weiwei’s confrontation with the authorities and how his art and immediately caught national media attention. Ai Weiwei premiered on January 24 at Sundance.  

Pariah, now in wide release, is director Dee Rees’ story of Alike, a Bronx teen struggling to find her sexual identity. A coming of age story in which the heroine is a lesbian. The story is made movingly specific by Rees’ screenplay and a breakout performance in the lead role by actress Adepero Oduye. 

We can only speculate that Angelina Jolie did not face the same obstacles that some other female directors face in making her first film Blood and Honey, a turbulent love story set against the charged backdrop of the Bosnian war. 

It seems very likely we are only seeing half the picture.

Dee Rees' 'Pariah' And Hollywood's Inability To Include Black Americans

Kia Makarechi
The Huffington Post, January 9, 2012

For all the talk of "liberal Hollywood," diversity is not among the movie industry's strengths.

Dee Rees, the director of "Pariah," a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story that focuses on a black lesbian's experiences coming out in New York City, knows the story too well. In an interview with Colorlines, the writer-director said those very words ("black," "lesbian," "coming of age") were often enough to immediately stop film studios and backers from participating. Read more...

Number of Female Directors in Hollywood Has Halved Since 1998

NME, January 25, 2012

The number of female directors working in Hollywood has halved since 1998, a new study has shown.

The Celluloid Ceiling study analysed the amount of females working for the top 250 grossing movies in the US. The latest findings show that women made up only 5% of directors during 2011. Read more...

Ai Weiwei: The Evolution of a Dissident

Allison Klayman
Jan. 22, 2012

I have always believed that the story of the dissident artist Ai Weiwei is not about how censorship stifles creativity, but rather how one artist is able to work around such obstacles.  It’s not about the system crushing individual expression, but about the power of an individual in the face of forces greater than himself. One thing is clear — Ai Weiwei’s story could not be possible without the Internet. We cannot imagine an Ai Weiwei without the megaphone of blogs and Twitter, without the ability to communicate instantaneously and connect to like-minded netizens around China and the globe. Read more…

'Angelina Jolie touched our souls'-Bosnian Rape Victims Have Their Say

   A year after it was banned from filming, a private screening of Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey wins praise from women victims of the 1991-95 Bosnia war for illuminating their plight.  "I first vomited, from the sheer force of my suffering," Enisa Salcinovicsays of her initial reaction to In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut feature film about the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

…The film portrays a romance between Danijel (Goran Kostić), a Serb man, and Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosniak Muslim woman, which blossoms as the last nails are being hammered into Yugoslavia's coffin. Read more...