Just as this decade began I was in New York on thankless work, and looking for ways to combat the dispiriting cold and privileged winter nights.
Just as this decade began I was in New York on thankless work, and looking for ways to combat the dispiriting cold and privileged winter nights. New York is a film lover's all-you-can-eat-paradise and I was watching a film every evening, sometimes without knowing much about it. This is how I stumbled upon Jafar Panahi's
The Circle.
Illustration/ Jishu dev malakar
The film surprised meu00a0-- so different was it from lyrical, humanist tales of large-eyed children running after little desires in the lanes between stacked houses that we have come to identify with Iranian cinema. Instead, here was a story of six female convicts just out of prison. As they pace the desperate, chaotic night streets of Teheran you realise that they are always in prison -- and an 'inappropriate' headscarf or travelling unaccompanied by a male relative could send them right back to jail in a constant circle of stifling misery.
What I loved most about this assertively-crafted film with its hand-held documentary style and bold, broad strokes, was that it was an extremely angry film. It had the impetus and speed of a bullet, of an enraged scream. It compressed and released the most fundamental response to injustice.
The film was banned in Iran and Jafar Panahi has frequently been persecuted by the government for the undisguised intertwining of his politics and his filmmaking. Like him, the filmmaker Tahmineh Milani too has earlier been imprisoned for her film The Hidden Half.
Every time I sign a petition in support of these filmmakers, I wonder if that signature will make a difference, and yet, given it's all I can do, I sign it with fervour and belief, because I know that sometimes it does indeed work.
Uncertainty after all, can hardly be a reason to not do something.
I wonder how these filmmakers keep doing what they do. How do they risk freedom and everyday happiness to speak truthfully about the world around them?
Of course this time the Iranian government has imprisoned Panahi without his actually saying anything. He gets six years in prison and is forbidden from making a film for 20 years because they feel the film he was making (which is only 30 per cent shot) was critical of the government. Sometimes you get punished for opening your mouth and speaking, other times just for taking a breath to begin.
I wonder too, why these powerful regimes, who cannot be stopped by that trigger-happy country the US of A from developing a nuclear programme, should feel so embarrassed by something as minute as a movie? If people are so convinced they are right, why should they fear criticism? Should we hope that truth still has a power we should not give up on?
We could ask the same questions of our favourite shiny democracy -- India. Like will the verdict in the Binayak Sen trial (out by the time you read this) uphold justice or endorse repression? Or why does the Central Board of Film Certification insist on being a censor watching out for any criticism of the state (and maybe soon, the other two of the Holy Trinity -- industrialists and movie stars)?
Their latest protection of democracy involves refusing a certificate to Ashvin Kumar's documentary Inshallah Football which follows a young, football obsessed Kashmiri man trying to get a passport so he can go to training camp in Spain. Their reason? The film speaks against the government and is one sided -- is that illegal Mr. Censor? For shame. It's a sad way indeed to end a decade.
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Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company.
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
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