by Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith.
For some reason, Iran seems to have an unusually large number of great female filmmakers. In recent years there were over 50 women making films in Iran. Shirin Neshat, who is best known for her Silver Lion award-winning movie Women Without Men (2009), tried to explain:
Perhaps those who are more oppressed tend to be more creative about speaking out. And evidently, it’s far harder for a woman to find a voice in Iran; as writers, artists, or filmmakers, they have to endure far more, in every aspect of life, and therefore their point of view is often more poignant. The men have it easier. And because women are under so much pressure, they end up being more innovative about dealing with crises and devising ways out. They become more subversive, in my mind. … Westerners have this sense that Iranian women are submissive victims. But they’re not victims, and they’re certainly not submissive. … What I’m saying is this: through their resistance and strength, Iranian women have a voice in Iranian society, and they continue to have a voice, perhaps more so today than ever before. (Azam Zanganeh, 46–47)
Here are three brief descriptions of such filmmakers.
Tahmineh Milani is the director, producer, and screenwriter for over a dozen major films, many of them strongly feminist. Her films have won six international awards, two of them for best director, and two for best screenplay.
As an electrical engineering student in the late 1970s, Milani was a left-wing activist against the shah. Then in 1982, after the universities temporarily closed to revise the curriculum (by adding more Islamic content), she joined a movie-making team, and became assistant director for The Red Line. She had her first chance as lead director in 1989, with Children of Divorce, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about women’s legal strategies in the Islamic Republic’s divorce courts. Then she started producing internationally acclaimed films every year or two.
In The Legend of a Sigh (1991), a woman sighs in despair at ever getting her writing published, and the sigh materializes into a figure who lets her switch at will between five different identities. In the 1992 movie What Did You Do Again?, a girl discovers the power to change her family just by talking to herself. Milani’s 1996 film Two Women follows the lives of two female friends, who are separated because one of them is forced to marry a jealous, controlling man. Conservative critics accused Milani of encouraging women to revolt. She said the critics were just scared that their own wives would riot after seeing the films.
In The Hidden Half (2001), a young woman joins a Marxist rebel group against the shah in the 1970s. Then after the revolution she has to conceal her past, even from her husband after she gets married. Finally however, she has to reveal the hidden half of her life. When this film was released, the government charged Milani with counter-revolutionary propaganda and threw her in Evin prison for two weeks. After President Khatami intervened to release her, she wove accounts of the women she met in prison into the film Settling Scores (2007). In this movie, a group of women who are released from prison rent a house together and make plans for revenge on men. Pretending to be prostitutes, they lure targeted men home, beat them up, rob them, and throw them out. Some authorities have regarded Milani as “extremely feminist,” but she’s probably best known for her comedies such as What’s Up? (1991), which features a deeply emotional robot.
Rakhshan Banietemad is widely acclaimed as the “first lady of Iranian cinema,” having directed 12 feature films and 23 documentaries between 1986 and 2018. Her movies usually explore the struggles of ordinary people, with titles such as Under the Skin of the City (2001) and We Are Half of Iran’s Population (2009). To achieve authenticity, she spends a lot of time living with the people concerned. For example, before making her film Gilaneh (2005), Banietemad spent a year and a half living in Espeyli village, observing the day-to-day lives of families in a community still suffering from the aftershocks of the Iran–Iraq war. From 1991 to 2016 she won 34 awards for her work at international film festivals. She’s donated much of the prize money from her films to support homeless or disadvantaged women.
Samira Makhmalbaf has made a string of emotionally gripping, fiercely compassionate films. In The Apple (1998), she portrayed an actual case where two young sisters were locked in a room by their parents for eleven years, and then released to discover the world. She wrote and directed this film at age 17. Blackboards (2001) presented a story of Kurdish teachers who wandered between camps of survivors from Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons attacks, offering open-air classes to the children. Next, Makhmalbaf made two films set in Afghanistan. The first, At Five in the Afternoon (2003), concerned a girl who secretly attends a newly opened secular school following the collapse of the Taliban regime. To do this, she has to lie to her father, convincing him that she is attending a fundamentalist religious school. Then in Two Legged Horse, Makhmalbaf portrayed a homeless boy who was hired to serve as a “horse” for a wealthy boy who had lost his legs by stepping on a landmine. While shooting this film, Makhmalbaf’s set was attacked by an Afghan terrorist, who hurled a grenade that wounded five of her cast members. When the film was finally released in 2008, it won three international film awards. In describing Makhmalbaf’s style of cinematography, one reviewer said it suggests an “archaic oriental tradition of shadow theatre, which though deceptively simple to the Western eye, has a way of lingering like an unsolved enigma for ever after” (Vincent, 2004).
These film makers worked around the state’s puritanical censors, but shared the prevailing concern for morality. Some of their films have portrayed dutiful women who made sacrifices for their families and the nation. But increasingly they showed women who defended their friends and children from the demands of abusive fathers, from war, the market, and the state. They explored the complexity of sexual desire, abuse, infidelity, abortion, double standards, and the fragility of modern individualistic human relations (Afary, 335–336). Largely due to these female film-makers, cinema critic James Rosenbaum wrote that “while Iranians continue to be among the most demonized people on the planet, Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized as the most ethical as well as the most humanist” (Ebrahimi, 144).
Sources:
Afary, Janet (2009) Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge U. Press.
Azam Zanganeh, Lila (2006) My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices. Beacon Press.
Ebrahimi, Mehraneh (2019) Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora. Syracuse U. Press.
Vincent, Sally (2004) “Beyond Words” (interview with Samira Makhmalbaf), The Guardian, April 3.
From Mother Persia: Women in Iran’s History, by Zhinia Noorian and Brian Griffith, soon to be published by Palgrave Macmillan