Speaking at a film seminar in Tehran this past week, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis made the following statement regarding the recent controversy over such films as “300” and “The Wrestler,” which resulted in the Iranian government demanding apologies for the cultural slanders contained within:
Mr. Ganis praised Iranian civilization and said the film “300” was based on a comic strip; its audience was not interested in the film’s credibility.
“No film can distort Iran culture,” Mr. Ganis added.
While it may be true that no film can distort Iranian culture as the esteemed Mr. Ganis claims, the current Islamist regime in Iran can most certainly distort culture in film, and do. And they have created masterpieces that would have had Hitler and Goebbels in jaw-dropping awe. You really only need to see the names.
TOM AND JERRY IS A JEWISH CONSPIRACY
As to the Zionist “Tom and Jerry,” the erudite Iranian scholar Hasan Bolkhari explained in his film seminar broadcast on Iranian TV that the cartoons were a conspiracy by the “Jew Walt Disney” to improve the image of mice in Europe.
See, Jews were called ‘dirty mice’ during the Holocaust, so “Jew Disney” didn’t want people looking at mice and thinking “Jew!” Ergo, Tom and Jerry. The Esteemed Mr. Bolkhari then went to say that yes, in fact, Jews WERE dirty mice! Cunning, too! Just like Jerry!
By the way, Mr. Bolkhari is not a lone nut job. He is in fact an Iranian Scholar who is cultural advisor to the Iran Education Ministry and is considered a “mass media expert” for the Iranian government. Much as I’m sure Josef Goebbels was considered a “mass media expert” for Hitler’s Third Reich.
For sci-fi buffs we have BLACK HOUSE, the epic and eminently bizarre tale of evil Jews in Space.
And let’s not forget the kids. It’s ALWAYS about the kids!
Cartoons teaching children hatred and martyrdom are as ubiquitous on Iranian TV stations as SpongeBob reruns are here. In fact, Iran is now exporting these cultural kiddie masterpieces to the larger Muslim world and is doing boffo business. A 2005 BBC report on Iran’s animation industry called this development, in blackly ironic fashion, “booming.”
Which brings us to this puzzling follow-up by the esteemed Mr. Ganis:
“Iran has the potential of making “big movies” if it can attract investment to cinematic marketing.”
The obvious question here, to me at least, is how can Iran’s film industry attract any significant financing when the country is under sanctions by nearly every nation on earth? And will be under even more if the Big Three in Europe have their way?
As to making big movies, the Iranian film industry seems to have had no problem producing films with blockbuster impact.
One such Iranian film, ASSASSINATION OF A PHARAOH, praises Khalid Islambouli, the “martyr” who assassinated former Egyptian President and “traitor” Anwar Sadat in 1981 for signing the Camp David Peace Accords.
The responses from the Egyptian government and people were nuclear. The film was protested by President Mubarak, the Egyptian Parliament, and by throngs of enraged protesters in the streets of Cairo. Egyptian pundits condemned the depravity of it all and expressed deep skepticism of official Iranian government denials of complicity.
Columnist Ibrahin Sa’ada of Egypt’s daily “Al-Akhbar” was particularly vehement:
This film reveals the depravity of the Iranian ayatollahs. Can anyone believe that the Iranian regime, which tells every citizen when to breathe and when to stop breathing, really knew nothing about this film, and that a ‘group of people simply decided to produce a film against the late Egyptian president and to glorify [the assassin Khaled] Islambouli and his gang, calling them “innocent and kind-hearted martyrs”?
The Iranian ayatollahs, heirs of Khomeini, who have cut out the tongue, chopped off the hand, wrung the neck, and slashed the veins of every oppositionist…does anyone believe that they let a ‘group of people’ write a script for a documentary, shoot it, produce it and air it without their consent?
Though the Egyptians can’t prove complicity on the part of Iran’s government, and the Iranians themselves deny involvement with the film, there are circumstantial factors that lend credence to Egyptian skepticism.
First, this Iranian film classic was debuted at a government-sanctioned film festival held by the “Committee for Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement in Iran.” Speaks volumes.
Second, the Iranian thugocracy has named a street in Tehran after Islambouli. Columnist Makram Muhammad Ahmad, head of the Egyptian Journalists Association, responded in force to that REAL cultural slander in the Egyptian daily “Al-Ahram”:
How would the heads of the Iranian regime feel if the Egyptians set up a statue of the [late] Iranian Shah in a Cairo square?
For the explosive climax, the Sadat family has launched a half-billon dollar defamation lawsuit against the Iranian regime over the film. Sounds like boffo box office to me.
But film content is not the only glaring oversight Mr. Ganis et al have made with regard to Iranian film. He also seems to be quite oblivious to the harsh plight of Iranian filmmakers themselves. French-Iranian filmmaker Mehrnoushe Solouki was arrested and thrown into Iran’s notorious Evin prison for the egregious crime of stumbling upon a mass grave.
Ms. Solouki described her experience of the discovery of the graves:
It was nothing like a cemetery. And it was obvious that thousands of people were buried under these stones and dust. And when I asked some of the people who were there, they said that nobody is talking about these people.
Iranian security forces picked her up after she spoke with a professor who, according to Solouki, believes what happened to the people in the grave is a crime against humanity. Radio Free Europe reported in early November that the grave contained the bodies of regime opponents executed in 1988.
Here is how Ms. Solouki, since released from prison after considerable international pressure, described her experience at Evin Prison, where detained American Roxana Saberi is currently confined:
My solitary confinement was like stepping into a grave. There was nothing, I was sleeping on the floor and there was a 24/7 light bulb on over my head.
Iranian filmmaker Tamineh Milani, a feminist who made a number of films highlighting the position of women in Iran, was arrested, tried and sentenced to death for the unforgivable offense of making and pitching “The Hidden Half.”
The film, a drama about a man torn between two women, one of whom is a political prisoner, and another who, unbeknownst to him, has her own political past. Among other things, the film depicts internal struggle in Iran soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
For this heinous celluloid offense to Iranian culture and Islamist purity Ms. Milani was charged by the Iranian regime with “supporting factions waging war against God, and of misusing the arts in support of counter-revolutionary and opposition groups.”
The blackly comic irony of the charge of misusing the arts would be uproarious if the situation were not so serious. Like Ms. Sokouli, Ms. Milani was eventually released after concerted outrage from both within and without Iran.
But Ms. Sokouli and Ms. Milani are the lucky ones.
Esha Momeni, a 28-year-old graduate student working on her master’s degree thesis in Iran about the country’s women’s rights movement, was arrested by Iranian police in October 2008 after filming interviews of women’s rights advocates. She was then imprisoned and held without bail in some subterranean Tehran hellhole.
In November of last year Ms. Moneni was finally granted bail after her father put up the deed to his apartment. But she must now stand before a tribunal for “acting against national security.”
Her fate has yet to be decided. But like Ms. Solouki and Ms. Milani, there are concerted efforts ongoing that may yet persuade the Iranian regime to release Esha. As in Hollywood, cut-throat totalitarian dictatorships hate bad press. Ruins their image.
But in Iran, who can really know?
And just how many other filmmakers and creative artists, not to mention ordinary citizens who do not enjoy such high visibility as the aforementioned filmmakers are languishing in Iranian hellholes, enduring nightmarish conditions and even torture without relent?
Were I an Academy President knowledgeable of all these circumstances I would have not left for Iran in the first place, especially given the Iranian regime’s atrocious human rights record.
If, say, I were requested by President Obama to go on a mission to extend one last olive branch to Iran, I would have at least made the first condition of any visit contingent upon the release of Esha Momeni before I even left the states.
And I certainly would not have remained in Tehran after that olive branch was slapped out of both my and President Obama’s hands with the apology demand. For film, I apologize to no one! By my standards, and that of most Americans I’m sure, in-your-face is where film needs to be!
But that’s just me. Like Mr. Ganis and the rest of Team Hollywood appear to be, I am not willfully blind or oblivious to the harsh and nightmarish realities of the Iranian thugocracy. And I would have been quite vocal to anyone demanding an apology for cultural slanders in film, especially given all I now know about theirs.
In fact, were I in Mr. Ganis’ place right now, I would probably be languishing in Evin Prison right across the hall from Roxana Saberi.
But as Mr. Ganis and Team Hollywood sip tea, share pleasantries and teach film seminars to the Goebbels-like propagandists responsible for the REAL cultural slanders in film I have elaborated on, and all of which is only scratching the surface, he and the rest of Team Hollywood seem to be as oblivious to the true state of Iranian film culture as they seem to be to the mobs of Iranian Gestapo and Hamas Blackshirts dancing in the streets of Tehran for ‘innocent’ blood-drenched Brother Omar Bashir, and by default genocide, beneath their gilded Iranian cages.
It would seem the Iranian film industry is not the only one in a very sorry state.
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