Kiarostami’s coded messages from Iran
Hans Kundnani
Kiarostami's Shirin opens in cinemas across Britain today
Since the early 1990s, Iran has produced a new school of filmmakers whose fusion of formal innovation and rough realism picks up where the French New Wave left off. And, much as movies like Godard’s Masculin, Feminin (1966) anticipated the evenements of May 1968, the films of directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have prefigured the demands for a more liberal Iran now being made on the streets. With television pictures from Iran in short supply as the regime tries to silence the protesters, these remarkable films offer an alternative glimpse into what ordinary Iranians think and feel.
Although political repression in Iran makes it impossible to make films that directly criticise the regime, directors like Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf—and the many others that have followed them—have subtly questioned the existing order through their films. In fact, cinema seems to be one of the few things that bridges, at least to some extent, the divide between public and private life in Iran that Anna Fifield described last week in the Financial Times. Read more »
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