Iranians Defy Censor with Bootleg DVDs
The must-see film in Iran this spring is Santouri, a gritty tale of a musician who struggles to get permission to perform in public. Ironically, the film does not have permission to play in public either. In Iran, all cultural performances are strictly regulated and anything deemed morally dubious is outlawed.
So instead of going to the cinema, Iranians are snapping up copies of the film from bootleg DVD sellers around the country.
By Dariush Mehrjui, one of Iran’s most renowned directors, Santouri won the people’s choice award at Tehran’s Fajr film festival last year. But then the authorities banned it.
“For me, the last year has been the worst of my career,” says Mr Merhjui, who pioneered Iran’s New Wave cinema movement with the 1969 film The Cow.
“There is this very rigorous censorship that is more or less destroying our culture,” he told the FT at his home in northern Tehran. He says he was not told why Santouri was blacklisted.
The film tells the story of Ali, whose increasing despair leads him to heroin addiction and separation from his wife. The implication is that Iran’s cultural repression and its significant drug problem are not unrelated.
Javad Shamghadri, arts adviser to the president, has publicly criticised the movie, suggesting it is part of a wider problem in Iran’s film industry.
“Even changing the train cannot solve the Iranian movie industry problem; we should change the railways,” he told reporters earlier this year.
Censorship is a decades-old problem for the Iranian film industry, considered one of the country’s greatest cultural assets.
But it has worsened markedly under President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s government, which has been trying to defend Iranian society against “cultural threats” from “arrogant global powers”, especially the US.
“Things have become very bad in the last two years, not only in the realm of cinema but in theatre and music and publishing too,” says Mr Mehrjui.