Got the Golden Shell but still not free in Iran
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.
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
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. Related news: 'Nîvê Heyvê' won the Golden Shell Ghobadi has been banned of shooting films in Iran! |
|