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Messages in a Bottle
If it is a truism that art flourishes under attack, I can think of no better recent example than the contemporary Iranian cinema, which has produced a succession of masterpieces despite circumstances of ever increasing adversity. In recent years, directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf , and Jafar Panahi have become fixtures on the international festival circuit. This year Asghar Farhadi's A Separation became the first Iranian film to win an Academy Award.
Since 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini established a revolutionary Islamic republic, film-making in Iran, paradoxically, has been at once encouraged and suppressed. Khomeini is said to have been well aware of film's immense power to define Iran 's image - not as much to the world as to his own people. In Nader Homayoun's documentary Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution, made in France in 2006, a former "Minister of State for Cinematographic Affairs" argues that film is an ideal tool for communication with the masses: "Its capacities are as vast as they are varied." After the bloody Iran-Iraq War, Iran's leaders seem also to have become aware that cinema could soften the nation's image abroad. And so the state finances a film institute that has trained nearly 100,000 filmmakers, but at the same time it promotes a vision of Islamically correct cinema and maintains tight control over what may be depicted on screen.
Out of necessity, Iran's filmmakers developed ways of getting around the censors. Makhmalbaf, while making his anti-war film Marriage of the Blessed, fooled the authorities by presenting them with a fake scenario containing revolutionary slogans. After modifications were proposed to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's film Nargess, about a prostitute whose lover marries a younger woman, the director boldly told the censor that she would outlast him. " 'You may not be there in a year. I'd rather wait.' And that's what happened," she told Hamayoun. Panahi's film The Circle (2000) deals with the subject of abortion and also shows a woman smoking- both previously unheard of. His method of opposition was to bring his complaints to the press: "It helped to create a bad atmosphere. . . . After nine months they let me make the film."
But in 2009 protests against the disputed re-election of Mahmoud...