Kurdish Filmmaker Details Anfal Atrocities

KurdishCinema

Got the Golden Shell but still not free in Iran

KurdishCinema.com / October 3 - 2006 / Melbourne

Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi's last feature film 'Nîvê

Heyvê' (Kurdish for Half Moon) is banned in Iran on the basis

that it was a ‘separatist’ film. Bahman Ghobadi told the

press, during the award ceremony at 54. San Sebastian Film

Festival in Spain, that although he is happy of getting Golden

Shell, the best film award, for Half Moon, he is very sorry as

his film has not been able to get the permission for

screening in Iran yet.

Also Ghobadi told, in an interview conducted by Michael

Guillen for Toronto International Film Festival, that he already

made self-censoring in the film but it looks like that was not

enough for the Iranian authorities. He said: “For example, I

had a beautiful musical sequence where women sang but I

had to self-censor it for myself because I knew it would be a

problem for the government to accept it. So I cut it. The irony

of it is that, even though I censored myself so badly, last

week in Iran my film was banned for the very first time. The accusation was that the film was

separatist, which is absolutely absurd. It's not a separatist movie at all. That's the reason why now

I regret my self-censorship. I feel now that, if it had to be banned, I should have filmed it like I

wanted to do in the first place.” (http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/007561.html)

Interestingly this is not the first time Ghobadi facing

restriction from the Iranian censors. When Bahman

Ghobadi completed his second feature and applied

for screening permission for the film he has been

told by Iranian authorities that the original title of the

film, “The Songs of My Motherland” was too

“nationalist”. The authorities advised him to change

the title but Ghobadi resisted keeping the original

title.

(Jamsheed Akrami’s interview with Bahman

Ghobadi,

at www.newrozfilms.com) As a result of

this

dilemma

his second feature, which later titled

by the

distribution company as “Marooned in Iraq”,

was only

screened in one theater in Iran in the city of

Hediye Tehrani in Half Moon

Tehran,

apart from Kurdistan region of Iran.

Likewise young Iranian woman director Samira Makmalbaf’s second feature film “Blackboards”

made in 2000, which tells the plight of Kurdish teachers and victims of Halabja massacre

wandering on the mountains of Kurdistan, had faced same kind of trouble because of its Kurdish

content and thus the film had to be smuggled out of Iraq and completed in Italy.

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