For most American filmmakers, freedom of subject matter
isn’t a problem. But for the growing genre of Iranian cinema,
whose films are beginning to receive greater international acclaim,
filmmakers deal with challenges in this area all the time.
“(The biggest obstacle facing Iranian filmmakers today is)
censorship by various groups, political and religious conservative
groups,” said Iranian-American filmmaker Bahman Maghsoudlou,
author of the first book on the history of Iranian cinema.
“Also, Iran faces a very harsh economy for the cinema. Eighty
percent of Iranian films are financed by the government. Only a few
films have been purchased ““ less than 5 percent ““ for
distribution abroad. The rest are losing money.”
Maghsoudlou is one of 10 Iranian or Iranian-American filmmakers
honored as part of this year’s 15th Annual Celebration of
Iranian Cinema, running from Feb. 11 until March 11 at the James
Bridges Theater. The series, put on each year by the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, has grown in popularity, mainly due to the
large Iranian community surrounding UCLA.
“As a public arts institution, we’re interested in
serving all sectors of the public, and the fact is that the largest
Iranian population outside of Tehran is based right here in
Westwood and Beverly Hills,” said David Pendleton, programmer
for the Archive. “The Iranian program we do every year is one
of our best attended events because of that.”
Despite setbacks, the film industry in Iran is now beginning to
flourish thanks to the invention of digital technology.
Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz, a graduate student in
film at New York University, used digital technology to create her
film “The Color of Love,” which will be screened at the
festival on Feb. 26.
“Digital technology allowed me to go into different spaces
oftentimes unnoticed because it looks like a home movie camera. The
new cameras are pretty small,” Keshavarz said.
Both Pendleton and Keshavarz agree that because of the emergence
of digital technology over the past 15 years, a wider variety of
films is now coming out of Iran.
“With digital technology, you can make films on your own,
you can make films about general people,” said Keshavarz.
“I think in the next five years, with digital technology,
it’s so much more accessible that a lot of different stories
are going to come out from women or from minority
cultures.”
With or without the new technology, however, Iranian filmmakers
are finding ways to circumvent government censorship of their
movies. Maghsoudlou explains that in order to get around the
censorship of political and religious groups, filmmakers in Iran
must be more creative than usual.
“The Iranian filmmakers have created and work hard to
create devices to bypass those restrictions,” Maghsoudlou
said. “The cinema becomes more symbolic, more philosophic,
more metaphoric, to handle the core storyline and the
message.”
Amita Firouzi, a fourth-year psychology student and cultural
chair of the Iranian Student Group at UCLA, agrees.
“The film-censoring bureau of Iran has become a lot more
lenient on which films are allowed to be shown on screen, and most
producers try to take as much advantage of that as possible,”
Firouzi said. “Persians are opinionated and smart. They need
free speech to express themselves, so if they don’t have it,
they’ll find other ways to show it, or push their
limits.”
According to Maghsoudlou, since the Iranian revolution in 1979,
the population has doubled, but the number of movie theaters has
decreased by half. Currently, 72 percent of Iran’s expanding
population is under age 30, and they look to the cinema for
inspiration.
Scores of these young people are now coming to the movies
because of Iranian cinema’s growing success abroad, and are
subsequently inspired to create their own pieces of art. Filmmakers
like Keshavarz eagerly await these new cinematic voices from
Iran.
“Iranian cinema has created such a niche for itself.
Fifteen years ago, who really knew internationally about Iranian
cinema?” said Keshavarz. “(Filmmakers in Iran), through
censorship and restrictions, have created an art form that’s
amazing and beautiful and striking, and yet even that form itself
will be changing.”