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Society & Culture

Kiarostami is Gone — But what about the Artists Still Here?

July 13, 2016
IranWire Citizen Journalist
11 min read
Shahram Nazeri’s concert was cancelled in Nishapur although he is regularly seen and heard on Iranian TV and radio
Shahram Nazeri’s concert was cancelled in Nishapur although he is regularly seen and heard on Iranian TV and radio
The Kamkarha group often encounters problems because of its female singers
The Kamkarha group often encounters problems because of its female singers
Kayhan Kalhor, the four-time Grammy Awards nominee, had problems getting a permit for his tour
Kayhan Kalhor, the four-time Grammy Awards nominee, had problems getting a permit for his tour
Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Despised by the Supreme Leader, Loved by President Rouhani
Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Despised by the Supreme Leader, Loved by President Rouhani
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi: His novel The Colonel has been published in English and French but not in Persian
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi: His novel The Colonel has been published in English and French but not in Persian
Parviz Tanavoli has been barred from leaving Iran because his statues are deemed to be “immoral”
Parviz Tanavoli has been barred from leaving Iran because his statues are deemed to be “immoral”
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad: Rouhani’s government lifted the ban on her unauthorized movie
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad: Rouhani’s government lifted the ban on her unauthorized movie
Bahram Beizaie: He is not allowed to stage his own plays, though other directors can
Bahram Beizaie: He is not allowed to stage his own plays, though other directors can
Jafar Panahi: He has made three illegal movies while under a 20-year ban on making films
Jafar Panahi: He has made three illegal movies while under a 20-year ban on making films

An Iranian citizen journalist, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity, wrote the following article on the ground inside Iran.

 

A young woman holds a cardboard sign that reads: “Kiarostami is Gone but Shajarian is Still Alive.” Photographs of her have been doing the rounds on Persian-language social media and news sites. It’s a simple sentence, but it speaks of a painful reality: When filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was alive, most of his movies were not screened in Iran, the country that he loved. 

But he is not the only Iranian artist to have received such treatment. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Bahram Beizaie, Jafar Panahi and many others have suffered the same fate. Politicians only acknowledge them when they need people’s votes and approval. Most of their work was banned by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance — an issue that current president Hassan Rouhani and his cultural team campaigned on during the 2013 presidential election. At the time, they promised to make life easier for these artists. Over the last three years, there has been some loosening of restrictions, but not quite enough.

Jafar Panahi: Filmmaking under House Arrest

In 2010, the Revolutionary Court sentenced filmmaker Jafar Panahi — who has won many top awards at major international film festivals —to six years in prison on charges of “actions against national security” and “propaganda against the regime.” It also gave Panahi a 20-year ban on making movies or pursuing other artistic activities, plus a travel ban. He cannot leave the country. The verdict led to an international outcry and eventually, the regime placed him under house arrest instead of sending him to prison. But the ban on his activities remained, and will remain in place until 2029 unless the court decides otherwise.

But Panahi continued to make movies, albeit illegally. The first, in 2011, was a documentary given the sarcastic title “This Is Not a Film,” in which the filmmaker talks about his life under house arrest while awaiting the appeals court verdict. It was screened at Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.

The second, made in 2013, was another documentary, Closed Curtain. It was screened at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for Best Script. But his most successful illegal film has been Taxi, which was released in 2015. It won the Golden Bear award at Berlin Film Festival, which was collected by his niece, since Panahi could not receive the award himself.

But even before his conviction, Panahi was no stranger to having his films banned. Of his eight feature films only two, 1995’s White Balloon and 1997’s The Mirror, have been screened at public theaters. His 2006 film Offside, about girls who try to watch a football match but are not allowed into the stadium because of their gender, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival but was shown only once in Iran, at Tehran’s Fajr Film Festival.

Bahram Beizaie: Censorship by Stealth 

Like some of his own work, Bahram Beizaie is shrouded in mystery. He is one of the few Iranian artists and writers who has never taken sides in Iranian politics. He has used his art to protest without sending out explicit political messages. A filmmaker, playwright and researcher, Beizaie has never been officially banned from working — it is even rumored that officials have invited him back to Iran to make movies since he has been out of the country — but he is censored nonetheless. His last play was staged nine years ago and he has not made a single movie in Iran in the last eight years. It is not clear why Beizaie has been prevented from staging his own plays, when other directors have been allowed to present the same plays to audiences.The most recent example was only two weeks ago, when Mohammad Rahmanian was allowed to stage a Beizaie play that the playwright has been forbidden to produce. 

Beizaie’s books are published sporadically. His older writing is reprinted regularly, but nothing recent by him has been published.  

Authorities have also banned Beizaie from teaching at universities in Iran since 1980, immediately following the Islamic Revolution. For the past seven years, he has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in California, and has published several plays and an academic textbook. 

Some reports say that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has issued a permit for one of Beizaie’s film scripts, and that it only remains for him to return to Iran to make the film. But Beizaie has refused to do so until the ministry issues permits for the publication of his new plays. Three of his works have been “under review” for more than two years, and there has been no news on whether they will be approved. In the meantime, Beizaie has staged his plays in California and they have been well-received.

Contrary to all indications, Iranian authorities deny that Beizaie is on their blacklist.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad: A Small Step Forward

Unlike Bahram Beizaie, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad has never concealed her support for reformists. In the run-up to the disputed 2009 presidential election, she supported the reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Her “protest” movies include Under the Skin of the City (2001) and the We Are Half of Iran’s Population (2009), which champions women’s rights in Iran. These films make Bani-Etemad’s political views and perspectives on Iranian society very clear.

After the events of 2009, Bani-Etemad made two documentaries, both of which were screened without any problems. But authorities working under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad banned her film Tales. She made the film without a permit from the Ministry of Culture, although during the first year of Hassan Rouhani’s presidency, it received a permit and was screened without any cuts having to be made. The movie was entered in the Venice International Film Festival and won an award for best screenplay.

When it comes to rolling back censorship in Iran, the story of Tales is a rare success story. 

Parviz Tanavoli: “Immoral” Statues

Parviz Tanavoli has recently been barred from leaving Iran. Throughout the years, he has been active both inside and outside Iran, with his work being exhibited internationally and up for auction in both domestic and international markets. Two major museums in Tehran, the Niavaran Palace Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Arts, have his work on display. Tanavoli’s work has also been exhibited at London’s Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Arts in New York City. 

Prior to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Tanavoli had given 52 of his statues to the city of Tehran for a nominal fee, and some of them were erected around the city. Although there was a mysterious outbreak of statue thefts across the city a few years back, Tanavoli’s work remained unscathed. 

But soon, Tanavoli entered into a dispute with the city’s officials. Before Ahmadinejad became the mayor of Tehran in 2003, Tanavoli and city officials entered into an agreement that would turn Tanavoli’s home into a museum. But when Ahmadinejad took over as mayor, this process slowed down. And when Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf replaced Ahmadinejad as mayor in 2005, it ground to a halt. In 2014, Tanavoli returned his statues to his studio, insisting that city officials had not looked after them adequately. The municipality then filed a complaint against the sculptor and, in mid-March of this year, repossessed the statues and took them to an unknown location.

Tanavoli has reportedly been barred from leaving Iran because of this dispute, with Tehran’s city officials allegedly working behind the scenes to make sure the sculptor is punished for his intransigencies. But Tanavoli himself has said he has been given a travel ban because Iran’s security forces have complained his statues are “immoral.”

 

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi: “A Different Account of the Revolution”

The case of Mahmoud Dolatabadi, one of the most prominent contemporary Iranian writers and a recipient of the French Legion of Honor, is another mysterious case. It is not clear whether his works have permits for publication or not. On the one hand, a compilation of his journals was republished a few years ago. But on the other, books by him that have previously been published have not been granted permits to be reprinted.  

Like many other artists and writers, Dolatabadi fell out of favor after the 2009 presidential election, and during Ahmadinejad’s second term. During the 2013 election, he publicly supported Hassan Rouhani, and when Rouhani was sworn in, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance approved of him once again. The minister and his deputy put Dolatabadi’s name on the invitation list for cultural events sponsored by the ministry.  

But his problems were not yet over. The main stumbling block seems to be his novel The Colonel, which has been translated and published in English and French, but has yet to receive permission for publication in Iran in its original Persian.

The Colonel tells the story of a patriotic Iranian officer in the Imperial Army. His life and the life of his family are torn asunder by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. His five children take different political paths and all suffer for their choices. The story takes place on one rainy night as the colonel is trying to retrieve and bury the body of his youngest daughter, who has been tortured to death for handing out leaflets criticizing the new regime. “It’s about time everyone even remotely interested in Iran read this novel,” an article published in the UK newspaper the Independent said in 2011. The paper described it as powerful portrayal of “a society ravaged by a warped morality.”

So it was no surprise when, in 2008, an Iranian publisher asked the Ministry of Culture to grant a permit for The Colonel to be published and the request was rejected. For the last few years, there have been rumors that the book was close to getting a permit, but officials have denied the claims.  

In 2012, Dowlatabadi gave the New York Times his own story about his encounter with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. “Finally, the vice chairman of books in the ministry read it,” he said, “and under pressure responded: ‘Yes, it’s a good book. But it’s a different account of the revolution.’ He said, ‘This is not our understanding of how the revolution occurred.’ So I said, ‘But it is my understanding of what occurred.’ In the meantime they didn’t say yes, and they didn’t say no. So it’s still stuck.”

Mohamad Reza Shajarian: Divisions at the Top

Mohamad Reza Shajarian has been called “Iran's greatest living master of traditional Persian music,” but the story of his censorship is straightforward. Influential members of the Iranian regime —  including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — do not want his voice to be heard in public. But another faction, which includes President Rouhani, praise him often. “The president and the minister of culture [Ali Jannati] are opposed to my banning,” Shajarian told an Iranian newspaper. “Some groups of people are against me, though. ... I don’t know what their problem is with me.” This division exists even within Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security, which could grant him a blanket permit to perform if it so desired. 

Shajarian is seriously ill with a kidney tumor. It  appears time might be running out for him. But, for the last six years, he has not been allowed to perform in Iran. In June 2016, it was announced that he would receive permits to perform some of his new work, but Shajarian remains absent from the public stage.

Kayhan Kalhor: Local Dictatorships

Kayhan Kalhor is internationally recognized as a master of Iranian classical music and a virtuoso instrumentalist. He lives in the United States and is the only Iranian musician who has been nominated for the Grammy Awards four times. He performs mostly outside Iran and has never had problems releasing his work — until 2015, when authorities refused to grant him permission for a concert tour in Iran. At that point, Kalhor announced he would never perform in Iran again. However, in June 2016, officials granted the permit and he began his tour. There was, however, one problem. His first concert was planned to take place in the city of Nishapur in the northeast province of Razavi Khorasan, but local authorities came to an independent decision to cancel his concert. Other than that, his concert tour was a success. 

In the past few years local authorities in certain provinces, including Isfahan and Khorasan, have decided that they too have the authority to cancel concerts — another example of this is the singer Shahram Nazeri. His Nishapur concert was also canceled, even though he had never encountered any problems with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, even under former President Ahmadinejad. Iranian state-run radio and television broadcast his performances on a regular basis. But when it comes to music, some local dictatorships continue to have the last word. 

 

Mona Bijani, Citizen journalist

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