Taboo in Tehran is out

Director reveals hidden sex lives of Iranians at Cannes

Cannes: Ali Soozandeh knows his film about the secret sex lives of Iranians will never be shown there. Nor is he likely to be welcomed home with open arms for portraying a religious judge with a taste for sadomasochism who keeps a harem of women scattered across the country’s capital.

But he doesn’t regret for a second pulling back the veil on sexual hypocrisy and corruption he claims is at the heart of the Islamic Republic in his daring animated feature Tehran Taboo.

“I wanted to break the silence in Iran,” Soozandeh said at the Cannes film festival, where the film has been compared to Marjane Satrapi’s international hit Persepolis.

“By keeping silent we don’t help society evolve nor tackle its problems,” he added.

Soozandeh, 47, who lives in Germany, said the myriad religious restrictions in his homeland force people to cheat and be dishonest with themselves, rotting them from within.

“Iranians are a creative people and learn quickly how to get round prohibitions... To compensate for forced public fronts” people can go “out of bounds in regards to sex, drugs and alcohol”, he added. “Lack of freedom pushes people into living by double standards.”

Tehran Taboo turns on Pari, a hooker with a heart of gold who takes her mute son with her to work on the streets, a relatively common practice in Iranian cities, Soozandeh said.

Forced into prostitution because her jailed drug addict husband won’t give her a divorce, the judge who refuses to sign the papers makes her his mistress.

Elias, the film is a panorama of Tehran’s hidden vice, duplicitous respectability.

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