Actress Golshifteh Farahani, exiled in Paris, reveals the pressures on Iran’s artistic community after anti-government film-maker is arrested
Actress Golfshifteh Farahani said she was forced to leave Tehran after starring in Body of Lies Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features
Golshifteh Farahani knows how dangerous it is now to be an artist in Tehran. In 2008 she became the first Iranian-based actress in almost 30 years to appear in a Hollywood blockbuster. Starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies, she hoped the film would be appreciated in her homeland for its critical stance on America’s politics in the Middle East.
She was wrong. When she returned to Tehran the then 24-year-old was subjected to seven months of inquisition from the authorities of the Islamic republic. Reprimanded for not having asked the permission of the government, she became a regular guest of the Information Ministry and intelligence services.
Eventually she cracked. By the time Body of Lies was released, she was an exile in Paris. She does not know when she will go home.
Last week, as the Iranian diaspora reeled from the arrest of Jafar Panahi, the most outspoken film director still living in Tehran, Farahani felt a fresh rush of fury towards a regime which critics say is taking ever greater steps towards a total crackdown on free speech.
Panahi, a vocal supporter of the opposition movement and known for his award-winning, politically subversive movies, was taken from his home in Tehran on Monday night along with 16 others. Most have since been released, but Panahi remains in detention. He had reportedly been making a documentary on the mass protests which came in the aftermath of last year’s disputed elections.
“We are so angry,” says Farahani, now 26, and a year and half into her new life as one of the French capital’s “family” of Iranian artistic exiles. “Jafar is one, maybe the only one… still in Iran who is talking. Most artists [in Iran] don’t talk because they would rather work somehow. I appreciate that, but Jafar is the one who had the courage to talk, and he talked for everyone.”
Farahani, who is using her time in Paris to make the music she could not have made at home and to pursue her acting career, admits to feeling uncomfortable with her new role as critic-in-exile but says: “There’s no bullet in your head. You can talk freely.”
She feels the changes in Iran are such that she is obliged, as one of her country’s most recognised cultural ambassadors, to speak out. For the past month she has worn a green bracelet discreetly under her shirt sleeve – marking her out as a supporter of the green movement led by Mir Hossein Mousavi. Yesterday she travelled to Geneva to take her place on the jury of the annual Human Rights Film Festival. “This time is the time that for 30 years we have been waiting for. We’re not kids any more. We are just asking for our rights,” she says, speaking as a member of a generation born after the revolution of 1979 and frustrated with the hardline tendencies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s regime.
As a musician and actress who grew up in a country convulsed by widespread violence and repression, Farahani has seen through her own eyes how Iran has become more hostile to those who dare to speak out through their creativity. She remembers how, under the successive presidencies of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, rules governing music and cinema became “relatively” open compared with the stringent censorship that dominated the 1980s. She remembers the first pop music that came out when she was 16 or 17. But she believes that, ever since Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, things have been very different.
“If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work,” she says. “So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.” After seeing it happen to countless friends, the lure of exile eventually seduced Farahani as well.
“I reached a certain point where I thought ‘OK, I cannot stay any more. This is finished’,” she says, remembering the pressure put on her by the regime after Body of Lies. “Although it was the best time ever [professionally], I could choose whatever I wanted, I was really highly paid compared to other actresses, I could produce, I could do anything – I chose to say goodbye.”
Now the beneficiary of a liberty “incomparable” with the lives of her counterparts in Tehran, Farahani struggles with the creative legacy of that period of her life. She finds herself automatically self-censoring and admits that even in a city more than 3,000 miles from home she does not feel completely free. She worries for her family. When she speaks to them, she knows she is also speaking to the intelligence services.
But, while she says her generation of Iranians have learned “never to hope”, she believes the movement for change could soon prove unstoppable. Rather than another revolution, she says, they would like to see “an evolution – we want even the mullahs to live in peace”. “It’s like a windscreen of a car: when there’s a little crack, it will be everywhere,” she says. “Either you have to change it or it’s going to destroy itself. And now the crack is there.”
Source: Guardian
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