The following article originally appeared on
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Arseh Sevom — “What grace? We would be better off if we forgot about the country and opened an orphanage. People don’t have bread, yet wine is imported from France. There is famine and sickness everywhere. People are forced to pay even for their breathing. The rain of blessings is bestowed upon us for the sake of His Majesty but flood and earthquake descend for the wrongdoings of the people. We have more executioners than barbers. Beheading is easier than circumcision. People don’t look like humans anymore, their foreheads are stigmatized with the seal of smallpox. Their eyes are languid from trachoma and their faces are skinny from opium…”
This was a monologue from a classic Iranian movie, ‘Haji Washington’, by the late Ali Hatami, the renowned Iranian director whose signature nostalgic view of the old Iran is celebrated by many Iranians –a style that won him the title of ‘the most Iranian film maker’. Haji Washington was produced in 1982, three years after the victory of the Islamic revolution, and it was immediately banned.
For the past 32 years there has been a complex relationship between the Iranian cinema industry and the Islamic republic. The ideologues of the Islamic revolution of 1979 sought justice and independence, dismissing the Shah as the figurehead of the status quo and opposing the West. The dawn of 1979 revolution started out with the mass persecution of actors, actresses, singers, musicians, dancers and other Iranian media figures. They were accused of having acted as accomplices of the former regime in propagating Western values – hence ‘westoxification’. Many were forced to sign repentance letters in revolutionary courts from the ‘mischief’ they had committed, for tainting youths’ minds and spreading ‘Western corrupt values’ in the society. The new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, justified their approach by famously arguing that they were “not against the cinema but against prostitution.”
