In early 1991, just a few years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, American audiences celebrated the film. Not without my daughtera Sally Field film that touched on some of the most terrifying fears an American can face. And also some of the most offensive ones.
Based on the heroine’s real-life memoir from a few years ago, the film centers on an Iranian man who tricks his American wife into going to the country and holds her there, using their child as a hostage. As one of the first pieces of mainstream entertainment about post-revolutionary Iran, it opened the eyes of Western moviegoers to a country that had not been considered since the release of the American hostages a decade earlier (and played on the same fears that arose from that episode). But she did so only in a sinister and cartoonish way. The film’s director, Brian Gilbert, and the actor who played the evil ex-husband, Alfred Molina, were both British with little apparent connection to the country, and it shows in the disturbing final product. Watch it now and see what you think. Or better yet, don’t do it. The only reassurance is that the film’s plot of women against the system was so generic that most viewers would forget where it was set in the first place.
Last Monday, 35 years later daughter It was released in theaters and with his country’s authoritarian regime reeling, Jafar Panahi, the poet of Iranian cinema — and more recently his country’s chief of caption — was a television guest, along with his translator, on Jon Stewart’s night. Daily show. The interview wasn’t very insightful – the host seemed more interested in congratulating Panahi for being a champion than exploring the context of that heroism. But the fact that a non-English speaking oppositionist was sitting in a chair late at night casually describing his multi-layered Middle Eastern country was an achievement in itself. Stewart’s interview represented a watershed moment – it not only demonstrated how far we have come in trying to understand Iran’s nuances, but also demonstrated the role of cinema in shaping that understanding.
Like many such changes, it happened gradually. The rest of the 1990s saw little mainstream Iranian entertainment, and 9/11 and subsequent regional concerns threatened to push us back into Gilbertese territory. But in 2003, as part of the post-9/11 moment, Miramax brought it out House of Sand and Fog, AThe film revolves around Iranian immigrant Masoud Bahrani (Ben Kingsley) and a rapidly escalating dispute with an American woman over a piece of real estate. The film didn’t seem overly interested in explaining where Bahrani came from, but it did humanize the Iranian character in some way. Girl I’ve never done that. It resulted in three pivotal moments later in the decade.
In early 2007, when then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was stirring up anti-Western and anti-gay policies, Andy Samberg and SNL They launched their widely circulated “Iran So Far” slogan, a short caricature of the Iranian leader, slyly criticizing his homophobia by making him the object of his bigotry. It was one of the first popular cultural signs that the Iranian people were victims, living under a regime they didn’t like either. The end of the year brought Persepoliswho grabbed Samberg’s extended stick and took off. Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her graphic memoir about fleeing the revolution became an artistic achievement, with some 600,000 people coming out of North America to see it, and earning an Academy Award nomination for animated feature alongside Hollywood mainstays like Ratatouille and Browse up.
And then, in the spring of 2009, No one knows about Persian catsa documentary about the underground rock scene fighting repression in Tehran. The film achieved great fame at the Cannes Film Festival a few weeks before presidential protests erupted in the country due to Ahmadinejad’s announcement of his victory, which his opponents said had been rigged. The so-called Iranian Green Movement has become an inflection point not only there, but here as well — you can’t step onto the West Side of Los Angeles without encountering massive parades of cars honking in protest and solidarity as they demand a free Iran, 30 years of the Islamic Republic, and a decade of cultural ferment, all coming to a head. Driving through it was like experiencing the kind of cinematic thrills and achieving a level of understanding that only movies can prepare you for.
By 2010, audiences were ready for an invasion of foreign films. The appetite converged with a whole generation of directors who spent their youth in the first years after the revolution. The renaissance of Iranian stories, told by Iranians from Iran, has begun to achieve successes. Asghar Farhadi separation — a domestic drama that turned out to be a mild criticism of the Iranian judicial system — turned into a huge box office success in late 2011 and early 2012 and would go on to win Best Foreign Language Film and receive an original Oscar nomination. In the same year, Panahi was put down This is not a movie, His brilliantly descriptive solution to the film ban, while appreciating the resourcefulness of relatable Americans.
Farhadi’s film would win the Foreign Oscar again five years later. Seller It was a story about a woman attacked as a metaphor for a blind country, and the director deftly reappropriated the ultimate American drama Death of a salesman To clarify this point. Iranian authors like Abbas Kiarostami have been around for decades and have won prizes at Cannes, of course. But suddenly ordinary Americans became osmotically aware of everyday Iranian concerns. (Jon Stewart directed the fact-based Iranian drama, rose waterin 2014, about a political prisoner who got into trouble because of his appearance on his show.)
The industry has become newly sensitive as well. It is now unthinkable for anyone to give the green light to Not without my daughteras MGM had done just a few decades earlier. This can feel like performative mindfulness. But the industry’s shift from celebrating a film about an Iranian ghoul kidnapping an American woman to films about the Iranian people themselves being held captive by a tyrannical state has shown exactly why cinematic choices matter. It is no coincidence that the percentage of Americans who have a positive “public opinion” of Iran has risen from 2% in 1990 to at least 15% in 2020, according to Gallup.
Against all this background has come the great moment for Iranian cinema over the past eighteen months, with Panahi’s film It was just an accident He became almost a cultural trope (and an Academy Award nominee and a foreign film nominee) and Muhammad Rasoulof Holy fig seed (It is set and shows footage from the year 2022 Women, life, freedom protests) a crowning moment of its own. Rasoulof and Panahi nurtured understanding with their personal stories as well, as the former fled Iran under the sword of prison time, while the latter ran toward it.
Demographic factors have played a role in all of this. At a time Not without my daughter We were just a decade away from the wave of post-revolution refugees arriving on these shores — a long way from the half-million Iranian-American citizens of Los Angeles, Long Island and North Dallas, children of that era who are now middle-aged and often have children of their own. An entire generation has grown up and mixed with Americans in some of our largest cities. Domestic film releases reflected these changes while also pushing them forward.
The Iranian fears of the American public have become so normalized that we have had moments of them in sensational television series. Season 3 of Showtime Homeland Set in 2013, set in Iran, and several years later Tehran It debuted on Apple TV+. Although the tensions felt by many Iranians between patriotism and hatred of the regime are background rather than a driver, they are quite palpable, through the cast of characters in both shows. When Iranian CIA officer Fara Shirazi (played by Nazanin Boniadi, whose parents fled Tehran with her when she was a child in 1980), chides Carrie Mathison, saying that she should see the distinction between the regime and the people – “There will be no “It’s boring if it’s not for me… so don’t treat me like the enemy” – she was teaching us all too. The final episode of the third season of the series TEHRAN — With the country’s capital facing existential threat from both the regime and outside powers – it first appeared hours before US bombs began falling on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and mullahs. The significance was hard to miss.
Watching any of these pieces means not only understanding a culture, but seeing its future, a rare case of entertainment that anticipates events rather than follows them. The heroine is the teenage daughter of seed Rebellion against older authoritarian rule that she and her generation neither chose nor wanted offers a crystal ball in the protests of the past few months. In reality, It was just an accident, thoWith its story of former political prisoners deciding what to do with a would-be tormentor, it packs a punch with smart insight behind In the current moment of wondering how the victims of the regime should deal with it after its fall, films once again raise questions in us that we have not yet realized we need to ask.
