Iranian Filmmakers Keep Focus on the Turmoil

Iran's government cannot silence the filmmakers. It keeps trying. Films are censored. Directors are prohibited to leave the country and prohibited to return home, forced to cancel projects and threatened with punishment if their films are too probing or too critical of life in the Islamic Republic. But the films keep coming, and so do the filmmakers. Iran's government has been busy fighting on many fronts, struggling to enforce order in the streets, restore unity within the ranks of the political and religious elite, and maintain some degree of legitimacy at home and abroad. Increasingly, that effort has failed as the government has used force, including lethal repression, to try to beat down protests and frighten the opposition into silence. Some of the most radical government supporters have begun calling for executing those who challenge and defy the will of the leadership. But the government is also moving against the opposition in less public ways, working to sanitize the school curriculum from what it deems subversive ideas, like the study of humanities, and to empower a new force of cyber-police to patrol the Internet. And there has been a special emphasis on trying to tame the movie industry, which even before the Islamic government came to power had a long history as a medium for expressing — and exploring — ideas considered taboo by authoritarian governments and a conservative society. For decades, filmmakers relied on allegory and symbolism to get around censors and provoke audiences to think.