“Even when we are not making movies, the films and stories of our lives are writing themselves, recording a period where we choose not to compromise on the cinema that we believe in or make propagandist movies or easy blockbusters,” Jafar Panahi, 2010.
If you work in the creative field, if your life is devoted to the creation of art, you also know that, if you were ever censored, banned or obliged to stop using your creativity, you would probably die. Yet even in our times there are artists all over the world whose voices are silenced.
On Monday it was announced that, following his arrest in March, Iranian film director and producer Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison and also banned for 20 years from making any films, writing any scripts, travelling abroad and also giving any interviews to the media including foreign and domestic news organisations.
Panahi’s first film, White Balloon, came out in 1995 and won a Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; his 2000 movie The Circle, revealing the mistreatment of women in Iran, won instead the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.
In his defence statement in November Panahi stated: “The sentence you will give will not be a sentence against me, but a sentence for Iran’s independent cinema. The cinema of Iran has in the past 30 years brought this country honour and a [good] reputation (…) This is not my trial only. It’s the trial of the art and artists of this country. The witnesses to any country’s history are artwork and the way artists are being dealt with. Therefore any sentence that will be given by the court will be a sentence against all the artists, particularly the filmmakers of this country. And even a sentence for the Iranian society that has been for years the audience of that art. My sapling and the saplings of all the artists of Iran have their roots in the soil of this country and the fruit of our art tree is the result of the beauties and ugliness of this land. Therefore, any sentence that you give for my thought is a sentence against the people of this country.”
The Bologna Cineteca launched a very laudable initiative: from Thursday 23rd December, the Cineteca’s Lumière cinema will open and close every day its programme with a screening of Jafar Panahi’s short “The Accordion” (shot also with the financial support of the Cineteca and presented at the Venice Film Festival which Panahi was unable to attend) that marked the director’s return to cinema after a first band imposed by the Iranian government.
I genuinely hope this initiative will be adopted also by other cinemas all over the world in support of Panahi, of Iran's New Wave cinema and, symbolically, in support of all those artists who are still marginalised, banned and censored for speaking their minds.
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Posted by: online writing | January 13, 2012 at 02:50 PM