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.   

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… 

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, 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…

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.

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…