Hard liners object to Iran’ s Oscar submission
Director Narges Aby ar remains confident art can still build bridges
TEHRAN, Iran—A movie about a young girl whose fantasy world helps her escape the hard realities of growing up in the countryside near Tehran in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution is Iran’s first-ever submission for the Academy Awards’ foreign film directed by a woman.
Not everyone is celebrating. The mixed reaction to Narges Abyar’s film Nafas, or Breath, shows how art cuts across Iranian politics, both at home and abroad.
Hardliners have criticized the movie, and it remains unclear whether Abyar and her husband would even be able to get a visa to attend the Oscars in March under U.S. President Donald Trump’s travel bans.
Nominations for the Oscars will be announced in January.
Yet the 47-year-old director and writer Abyar remains confident in the power of art to bridge cultural and political divides.
“Cinema, culture and art do not recognize any border, but in fact bring humanity closer together,” she said in a recent interview.
Breath focuses on Bahar, a lively girl whose asthmatic father is bringing her and her siblings up on his own with help from the children’s religious grandmother.
The film shows the rapid changes that hit Iran after the Islamic Revolution, and later, as Scud missiles fall, Iraq’ s invasion of Iran and the start of the ruinous eight-year war.
Parts of the film take place in Bahar’s imagination as she tries to escape the hardship around her.
“Don’ t let her read so much. She’ ll go crazy,” the grandmother tells Bahar’s father in a scene shown in the film’s trailer.
“Granny is right,” Bahar later muses. “You go crazy when you read books a lot.”
A by ar acknowledges she made an antiwar film. “The only thing that could destroy her fantasies and imagination was war,” Abyar said of the Bahar character.
“This film shows us the obscene face of war that we should avoid. This is what politicians won’t tell you,” she added.
Bahar refuses to attend Quranic classes, alleging her teacher was being mean to her.
Her uncle later teaches the girl how to read the holy book — though she prefers another that she found despite a plot she cannot grasp, a story about girls being kidnapped and put in a house full of prostitutes.
Not surprisingly, the film’s topics have proven controversial for Iran’ s hard liners, who describe the Iran-Iraq War in religious terms as the holy defence of the Shiite power from dictator Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government.
They have unleashed criticism on Abyar, despite the fact that her first film, Shiar 143 or Track 143, earned her hardliners’ praise for focusing on the role of mothers during the Iran-Iraq War.
“This movie is showing exactly what our enemies in the West want to see ,” said hard line cleric Ah mad Alamolhoda, an ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Gen. Mo ham med Rez aN agh di, a senior commander of Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, offered a similar view.
“The West is already spreading enough negative propaganda against us, so we shouldn’t spend our taxes on such a film,” Naghdi said, citing that the state-run Farabi Cinema Foundation submitted Breath for the Oscar.
Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani, now in his sec- ondt er min office, has promised to increase women’s participation in film, though it isn’t clear whether his pledge helped tip the scales and win Abyar the consideration for Breath.
Art can be a dangerous profession in Iran and filmmakers have fallen into trouble before.
Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Key wan K ari mi was released in April, after serving about five months of his year-long sentence over his work, though he escaped the 223 lashes that were part of his sentence.
He later said he doesn’t know whether he’ll make movies again in the Islamic Republic.
International politics also comes into play in Iran’s cinema.
While the Farabi Cinema Foundation routinely submits films to the Academy Awards, tensions between Iran and the U.S. have risen and ebbed in the years since the 1979 revolution and take over of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
While tensions appeared to ease slightly under president Barack Obama and with the 2015 nuclear deal, Trump has taken a much tougher line than his predecessor. Iran has been on every iteration of Trump’s travel ban predominantly targeting Muslimmajority nations. Iran also has been removed from the U.S. greencard lottery as well.