Iranian filmmakers Rafi Pitts and Marjane Satrapi shed some light on the hidden side of their homeland.

Words by Matt Bochenski

Iran is a country of contradictions. It is, we are told, an ‘axis of evil’ – a trigger-happy terrorist state of flag burners and Holocaust deniers whose nuclear ambition is a threat to world peace.

After the Western-backed Shah was deposed in the revolution of 1979, and replaced by a religious dictatorship, its creative industries were subject to the brutal censorship of Islamic law. Works of art were defaced and destroyed; books were burned; pop music was banned; and a whole series of statutes drastically curtailed the freedom of its filmmakers.

And yet Iran is a country where 70 per cent of the population is under 30-years-old. Its contemporary art scene is thriving; its students consume black market CDs; and its film industry plays a central role in the country’s cultural identity. Ever since Cahiers du Cinéma anointed Abbas Kiarostami the spiritual heir to Satyajit Ray, Iran’s neo-realist filmmakers have dominated international festivals. ‘Iranian cinema’ has become a badge of excellence – a byword for a thoughtful, meditative style far removed from the sex, violence and melodrama of the West.

Rafi Pitts, whose masterful It’s Winter drew comparisons to the work of Pasolini when it was released here in 2006, is one of its leading exponents, although he’s cautious about the labels applied to his country’s film industry. “I’ve never believed in any national cinema. For me, cinema is the point of view of a person. In Iran, there are 60 million points of view, so you can’t pin it down to one person representing an entire nation,” he says.

On the subject of censorship Pitts is surprisingly equivocal. “For the outside world, censorship seems very violent, but for us it’s always been there,” he says. “In fact, as crazy as it sounds, if you took it away our cinema would collapse.” One of the paradoxes of modern Iran is that the state’s repressive control is so absolute that it has fostered a perverse creativity among its filmmakers. Unable to use the subjects that other directors take for granted, Iran’s filmmakers adopted an oblique, elliptical style. And where, in the West, that kind of filmmaking would be kept comfortably away from the mainstream, in Iran, where cinema has long been inspired by poetry, ‘difficult’ films are more easily accepted. Despite censorship, “We have the freedom of artistic choice,” says Pitts. “There are other boundaries, but if you weigh them up, for me the artistic choice is more important.”

Though Pitts fled Iran at the age of 14 when war broke out with Iraq, he has since returned and is working from the inside to make the world aware of the subtleties and absurdities of his country. Marjane Satrapi, however, has taken another path. As her autobiographical film, Persepolis, shows, Satrapi was a young girl in 1979, excited by the romance and drama of revolution. But as the country changed, her parents sent their headstrong daughter to Europe where she drifted through the underground art scene in Vienna before returning home. As the war intensified, however, she left once again, never to return.

Educated in Strasbourg and based in Paris, Satrapi’s black-and-white, 2D animation (based on her own graphic novels) is a telling combination of insider and outsider perspectives. Persepolis is fiercely critical of the regime that has led Iran down one dead end after another, but it’s infused with love for the country and its people. “When you’re born in a place,” she says, “you always have a very incredible relationship with it, one that you don’t have with anywhere else.” Yet Satrapi has suffered for the success of the film, which shared the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government banned it, denouncing it as “Islamophobic”, and Satrapi is unlikely to be able to return home again. Even so, she has no regrets: “I cannot change myself. I have always said what I felt, and once in a while I pay a high price,” she says. “But it’s always better to pay a high price than to lose your dignity.”

The film, of course, isn’t Islamophobic in the slightest. Indeed, despite the fact that it’s black and white, Persepolis is a nuanced and intelligent study of Iran at odds with the usual bellicosity and stereotyping on both sides. This is Satrapi’s greatest source of frustration – that our misunderstanding of her homeland should cut so deep. “You don’t understand that we are human beings,” she says. “I don’t pretend that I can stop a war or change the world, but if people say, ‘Oh, Iranians are just like us,’ then that will be enough.”