CINEMA CONTEXT
Transcript of interview with Dr Lina Khatib (note - this is a transcript of an oral interview)


Persepolis is slightly different from the films that have been coming out from Iran from 1990.
I think the most important distinction is that Persepolis did not come out from Iran itself.
Persepolis is a French film that happens to have been written by an Iranian woman about her
own life in Iran and, of course, later in Europe.
So, this is a film that has been made with 100% European money as opposed to any support
by Iranian funders, and this is a film that has been completed outside Iran as well and that is
actually banned in Iran and so it is slightly difficult to place Persepolis within a wider context
of Iranian cinema from an industry perspective, but from a content perspective and, say, a
gender perspective Persepolis fits in well with several films that have been coming out from
Iran over the last fifteen years or so and these films tend to be art house films, so they are not
mainstream films. They are not films that would, let’s say, do very well in the commercial
cinemas in Iran but they are very interesting films and they are addressing, or they address,
social and kind of economic problems in Iran so, for example, a filmmaker called Jafar
(Panahi) has made films like the White Balloon (Panahi: 1995) or The Circle (Panahi: 2001) that
address the issues of women in Iran, the problems that many women face under the regime in
Iran today. Again Jafar‘s film The Circle (Panahi: 2001), for example, was banned in Iran
because it tackles a subject that’s considered taboo. At the same time you have films like Ten
(Kiarostami: 2002) by Abbas (Kirostami) which also addresses the problems of women in Iran
and again the film was not shown in Iran because it was considered too brave in tackling
these issues that are normally not talked about. So, Marjane Strapi’s film Persepolis also
tackles problems faced by women in Iran it actually, you know, highlights this issue quite well
and in this sense it is part of this movement toward addressing issues that are normally
considered unspeakable in Iranian society.
The second issue that Persepolis addresses is politics and again this is where Persepolis
differs from films coming out of Iran itself because to discuss politics is considered
unacceptable by the censors of cinema in Iran. When Persepolis talks about the effects of the
Islamic Revolution in a critical way this is something very different from what is allowed to be
represented on the screen in Iran itself. So, Persepolis is going a kind of step further in
addressing these issues. In Iran itself, if you have a film that is going to address politics in
anyway usually this is done in a very subtle way so that the messages are very subtle and not
represented explicitly and usually a lot of filmmakers have used children in order to comment
on these issues because when you represent a child on the screen you can say, as a
filmmaker, that you are representing a child’s point of view which is usually perceived to be an
innocent point of view and a point of view that is not corrupted or biased towards any
particular side. So, you have someone like Bahman Ghobadi in A Time For Drunken Horses
(Ghobadi: 2001) use children to comment on the situation of Kurds in Iran who are a
marginalised community. So, if you think about it Persepolis also represents certain issues
from the perspective of a child when Marjane herself is actually young. So again, you know
despite the differences content wise, Persepolis has also a number of similarities with other
films coming out from Iran.

Film in Iran is subject to several restrictions. Generally the three main things that are
considered controversial on the screen are sex, politics and religion, so films are not
supposed to show anything that could be deemed sexual in any way. So, for example, you
cannot portray romantic relationships where you have a man and a woman touching on the
screen even if they are represented as being married. This is still considered unacceptable.
The other issue is religion. So, films are not supposed to represent anything that is perceived
to be critical of religious doctrines in anyway and politics, of course, refers to the Iranian
regime and the Iranian state and the clerics who rule in Iran so films are not supposed to
address critically any issue related to the Iranian state. And so, in general, Iranian filmmakers
tend to shy away from representing these three issues and when they do represent issues
such as women on the screen, which can be seen as related to the big umbrella of anything
sexual in nature, even if their films are not about women’s sexuality, they tend to basically risk
having their films banned in the country and a lot of the films that people see in Europe that
have come from Iran that have addressed any of those three issues are films that Iranian
audiences have no knowledge about, because they cannot access them in Iran.
In Iran, the audience view films that are known as commercial Iranian cinema and these are
different from what most people in Europe would think about when they think about Iranian
cinema. Iranian cinema that you get in Europe tends to be the art house films which are, you
know, very good and very interesting. However, because they tend to be, let’s say, more
intellectual in scope and non-accessible to, let’s say, the person on the street they tend not to
be so popular in Iran itself. In Iran itself melodrama is the biggest selling genre. A lot of people
go and see melodramas about family issues. And, also, the Iranian state itself is a big funder
of Iranian cinema, it even funds some of the art house films actually so it doesn’t just fund
commercial mainstream films, but, in terms of the mainstream films that are state funded a lot
of them tend to be action films about the Iran/Iraq war. Believe it or not the Iran/Iraq war is
still a very popular topic in Iran today and you can see representations of this topic in cinema
on television and even in posters that are, you know, found on streets in different Iranian
cities. So, the films that people see in Iran tend to be either action films about the war or
melodramas about family issues, and also, there are a number of comedies, the most famous
example is, perhaps, is a film called The Lizard (Tabrizi: 2004) that came out a few years ago
and this was a film about someone who pretends to be a religious cleric and this film was
very successful in Iran, although it talked about a religious person who was a cleric but did
not portray him in such a way that the government thought it was unacceptable. So, the films
deal with these, you know, issues that are considered safe, I suppose, and these are the films
that the Iranian tend to see in large numbers.

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