Hiding your real intention deep within the film, just enough for people to recognise it while staying clear of the censors is a peril that political filmmakers from Iran face.
For a non-Iranian unaware of the country’s recent history, Tale of the Sea , screened in the International Competition section at the 23rd International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), is a film on a renowned writer coping badly on his return home from a mental health institution.
But, the slow unravelling of his mind and his hallucinations are also a potent commentary on the slow death of culture in the country. 76-year-old Bahman Farmanara, who directed and played the protagonist, has never been a ‘friend’ of the government.
“The idea behind this particular film was that, for the last 40 years — since the Islamic revolution — we have been faced with the end of cultural renaissance in our country. I meant to ask why we have stopped producing great artists,” he says.
Many of his films have been banned in Iran for a few years each, and even his passport was withdrawn at a time.
In 2009, during the widespread protests following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he wrote an open letter asking people not to remain silent and stopped making films for four years.
Unpopular choices
“I, as a filmmaker, could not be indifferent to what was happening in my country. We have filmmakers who are popular here too, like Majidi and others. They are government filmmakers, belonging to the system of Islamic revolution. I do not want to compromise to be popular with the government,” says Farmanara, who was a candidate in the 2013 Iranian Presidential elections.
In 2014, he made ‘I want to dance’ about a writer suffering from writer’s block, who starts hearing a melody in his mind and wishes to dance. After a ban of three years, it was released as ‘I want to’ in Iran, because dancing is considered taboo.
“Since the revolution in Iran, people have not been allowed to be happy or enjoy themselves. So, this writer, who is in a mental institution, imagines that people all over Iran are dancing. In our cinema, men don’t touch women, they don’t kiss or sleep together. I always tell this as a joke, that when the revolution happened, Iran had a population of 37 million. Somehow, in the past 40 years, we have managed to become 80 million. So, you are clearly not portraying on the screen what is going on,” he says.
When the script of Tale of the Sea was submitted to the censors, they wanted the only reference to the year 2009, in which the protests happened, to be removed from the film.
“I replaced it with a line that the writer asks his wife: ‘What is the year?’ She replies: ‘What is the difference? Nothing has changed.’ In a way, we said the same thing that we wanted to,” says Farmanara.
