14 Aug 2024
Tuesday 17 September 2024 | 1730-21:30 | Colours Hoxton
An evening of censored cinema and culture in Iran, feat. film screening of Jafar Panahi’s “3 Faces”, live Q&A and Toomaj Salehi’s music
On 16 September 2022 the world was shocked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. Her murder was a reminder of the brutal side of Iran, as was the crushing of dissent that followed. Despite the crackdown people did and still do resist, taking great personal risks in their quest to improve the rights landscape of Iran. Index on Censorship celebrates these dissidents and so, as we remember Amini, we want to spotlight them too.
With that in mind please join us for a night of Iranian culture and protest. The event will feature afilmscreening of Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, a panel discussion, and standing in solidarity with the rapper Toomaj Salehi, who is one of the most outspoken critics of the regime today.
Two years on we know the authorities would rather that we forgot about those who wish for a different Iran and that we would forget the name Amini. We will not. Instead we stand in solidarity with them and will continue our quest to raise awareness about how rights, especially around free expression, continue to be crushed.
Book your ticket to the event here.
Film Screening + Q&A
Iranian film director Jafar Panahi made his critically acclaimed and award-winning 3 Faces (2018) while being banned from filmmaking for 20 years and forbidden from leaving Iran. The film explores themes of womanhood and patriarchal rural Iran through the form of road trip adventure. The screening will be followed by a Q&A about cinema and censorship in Iran, plus a wider exploration of how cinema is used to control the global narrative.
#FreeToomaj
Join Index to stand in solidarity with Iranian musician Toomaj Salehi, as we listen to his powerful music campaigning for women’s rights and justice in Iran. Musician and creative practitioner, Roshi Nasehi, will read some of Toomaj’s lyrics as an expression of solidarity.
About Toomaj Salehi
Arrested, detained and imprisoned for his solidarity with Iranian women who courageously took to the streets in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was tortured, released, rearrested and sentenced to death for his lyrics supporting anti-government protests and advocating for women’s rights. Although the death sentence has since been overturned, he remains in prison. Index continues to campaign for his release.
Free copies of the latest Index magazine will be available for all attendees.
Book your ticket to the event here.
With thanks to SAGE (magazine sponsor)
With thanks to Colours Hoxton (venue partner)
9 Aug 2024 | Africa, Algeria, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Taiwan
Boxer Imane Khelif broke down in tears last week following her victory over Hungary’s Luca Anna Hamori in the welterweight quarter final at the 2024 Paris Olympics guaranteed her a medal. It was an emotional moment for the Algerian not just in terms of her sporting achievement but because she had spent the past week embroiled in a misinformation storm.
Khelif – who is now guaranteed at least a silver medal after her victory over Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng – was labelled as transgender in several viral social media posts, an inaccuracy which was then parroted by some news organisations and politicians. Khelif is neither transgender nor identifies as intersex.
Much of the recent viral outrage at Khelif’s Olympic success stemmed from a claim by the Russian-led International Boxing Association in 2023 that she and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed certain gender tests. These tests have never been published and are, as of today, unverified. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) revoked the IBA ruling, stating the decision was “arbitrary”, “sudden” and “taken without any proper procedure”.
The disqualification resulting from the IBA tests also apparently came after Khelif beat a Russian prospect at an IBA event.
There have been mixed reports over the content of the apparently secret gender testing, with IBA president Umar Kremlev claiming in a chaotic press conference that the pair had high levels of testosterone while the organisation’s chief executive alleged these were actually chromosome tests. Even beyond the lack of cohesion and clarity, the issue with sex testing itself is that every version invites criticism when scrutinised because most sports are organised according to a strict male-female binary, while nature does not follow such a binary – sex is more complex than that.
The IBA does not oversee Olympic boxing. Their credibility was seriously damaged in recent years following longstanding accusations of a lack of transparency and poor governance. They were finally suspended as boxing’s governing body and stripped of involvement in the Olympic games. Neither the IOC nor World Boxing endorse the ruling made by the IBA.
The IBA has close links to Vladimir Putin and Russia, a country which has been involved in massive misinformation campaigns around the Olympic games because their athletes were not allowed to compete under the Russian flag.
According to AP, Russian bots have been responsible for amplifying the Khelif controversy. The story was soon picked up by voices with huge followings, including billionaire X owner Elon Musk. It travelled beyond social media, with several news organisations and politicians wrongfully asserting that Khelif is transgender. US-based newspaper The Boston Globe were forced to issue an apology for labelling Khelif as transgender in one of their headlines. Fox News also labelled her as a transgender boxer live on air, while host Ainsley Earhardt wrongly described her as someone who identifies as a trans woman. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated these false claims.
The dangers of misinformation have been well-documented in the age of social media but are as relevant as ever in sewing division. Fake news spreading on social media sites is currently fuelling a number of political agendas and was cited as one of the catalysts for the far-right Islamophobic and anti-immigration riots in the UK.
BBC disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring, who deals with such viral mistruths on a daily basis, told Index in February that the unregulated spread of misinformation can cause real-world harm, so it’s crucial in a free society to call it out.
“If you are being repeatedly hounded or abused online, your freedom of expression is compromised,” she explained. “What I’m doing is exposing the harm these extremist truths can cause rather than policing what people can say.”
Khelif herself has been subjected to hate and abuse on a huge scale, as has Yu-ting, who is also competing at the games and is guaranteed a medal. IOC president Thomas Bach condemned the narrative surrounding the two athletes, calling it “politically motivated”.
“All this hate speech, with this aggression and abuse, and fuelled by this agenda, is totally unacceptable,” he said during a news briefing.
Even more worryingly, these allegations could have had serious consequences when you consider that in Algeria – Khelif’s home country – being transgender is illegal.
There are legitimate questions in a free society to be raised around gender in sport and the IOC’s Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations was criticised by some international sports medicine bodies in 2022. No one should be silenced for asking these questions or having the conversation.
But the heat around Khelif has not been about asking questions. Instead the issue here is one of jumping to conclusions. What could have been a heartwarming story of a woman finding sporting success against all odds became a cautionary tale of the dangers of misinformation and the speed at which unchecked information or false claims can be spread on social media platforms, endangering people’s lives and distorting reality. Who wins the gold medal here? Russia.
2 Aug 2024 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
They emerge very slowly from a black hole in the background. Men and women, their faces tired, all take heavy steps. Some are dragging a bag, others have mattresses and household objects. The stage is lit in green and red, illuminating the young actors and dancers one by one, emphasising their individual suffering. The music – rapper Hijazi’s remix of the traditional Palestinian choral song Tarweeda Shamaly – repeats in a hypnotic loop to tell us that, for 70 years, the story of Palestinians has always been the same: moving forward in an exhausting and constantly uprooting process. The Palestinians call it Nakba and this dance-theatre show named The Story is Sick by the Ayyam al Masrah company, the only one active in the strip, was performed just over a year ago live in Gaza. It was a performance like no other which I saw on a reporting mission to the strip. Today it seems to rise again in tragic reality, after 7 October 2023.
The theatre has been destroyed now and no longer exists. The cast and crew have paid a horrific price for living in Gaza. Of the company’s 20 or so actors, aged between 20 and 35, many are displaced in Deir al-Balah. Only one, the stage technician, Ahmad Gheidar, decided to stay in Gaza, risking his life; a couple of actors, Mohannad and Lina, got engaged, left Gaza and did everything they could to escape to Egypt; three have died with all their families. None of the members of the company have a home to return to; their houses are all destroyed. The only thing left to the actors of Ayyam al Masrah is theatre, as the artistic director of the company, Mohammed al-Hessi recalls, constantly disturbed in the background by the buzz of Israeli drones.
For al-Hessi himself it was unimaginable that one of the play’s characters – a Palestinian, forced to abandon his home in 1967 and wander through refugee camps in the region – would be his reality a year later. Displaced from Gaza City after the Israeli bombings of November 2023, he and his wife and three daughters are searching for a fourth refuge, after Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and Rafah.
“I am very worried,” he told Index in a series of daily voice messages that continue a dialogue that has already lasted more than six months. “There are thousands of people who continue to move by cars and donkeys like us. After being shot in the back and miraculously unharmed, I spent two months on Rafah beach in al-Mawasi. Here, at times I hoped to end it all. The cold in February was excessive and we tried to survive by somehow diluting the salty sea water for drinking. I was morally destroyed by the impossibility of giving a dignified life to my wife and my daughters, but I didn’t believe I would be forced to move again and again to get away from the bombings that reached us as far as the south of the strip”.
Al-Hessi’s fate is also that of a man unafraid to speak truth to power: inconvenient for Israel, to the point of not being able to leave Gaza for seven years now, because he raises political issues in his plays and is not afraid to highlight the impact of the Israeli occupation on Gazans’ daily life; inconvenient for Hamas because the theatre company has been the only one on the strip since 1995 that does not bow to the local powers that be. He has challenged Hamas’s moral police by putting men and women on stage as couples and has had the courage to question the Islamic values on which daily life is based, stimulating debate among spectators. In the audience, men and women sit together, next to each other, condemned by Hamas authorities as a dangerous potential for “promiscuity”.
In Gaza City, the success of The Story is Sick was so overwhelming when it was first staged in February 2023 that the number of performances was doubled to 40. “People loved our show because it manages to generate a great debate between the public and the actors,” al-Hessi told Index proudly. “After the performance everyone asks questions, as if looking for a solution. And the theatre has always been full: those who saw the show brought other people, students, associates. At the debut there were 350 people in the room and there were people waiting outside, sitting on the stairs.”
For those who attended the play last spring, the atmosphere was alive with debate, pulsating even. From the stands, many were wondering about the weight of tradition on family relationships and how the Israeli occupation and segregated life on the Gaza strip made the patriarchal system and male-female dynamics more burdensome and complicated.
Hana Abd al-Nabi, a lively and dynamic actor in the company, wrote the script of The Story is Sick together with the artistic director. She explained: “In this show we faced a new challenge: it was the first year in which we added male figures to the narrators on stage because we had always entrusted the role of the narrator to a female voice and body. The audience so far had not been mixed but was mostly female only.
“We then inserted male characters into the show and encouraged the presence of young men in both to change their point of view on the topics treated in our comedies. The female character tells the story from her point of view, and the male character tells the same story from his point of view. As an author I had to split between genders: if I were a man, would my wife say a certain thing, and would she complain in a certain way? And what would I do if I were a woman? And who would be right between the two? On stage, with respect to individual stories, both genders – man and woman – are right, each from their point of view. Actually, we still find ourselves trapped in the same cultural and social pattern, from the era of the Arabian Nights to the era of social media, where our entire lives, even private, are discovered, exhibited.”
The project started with a workshop between 23 actors to understand how to tell a story. The cast of Ayyam al Masrah had gathered the voices of three generations of Palestinians from Jaffa, Haifa and all of historic Palestine. Stories of the first Intifada, the second, and life today. Stories of couples who got married or who lived together or who had a love story. Each actor brought six stories. “In this journey,” said al-Hessi, “we saw something happen in front of us: in this story of the Palestinian people there was something sick. From 1948 to today, love and life have progressively disappeared. And we saw that the future in the eyes of the young was already broken, and that each of us was torn to pieces. We saw how each event – an intifada, an offensive, a siege – had an increasingly worse effect on social life. In the difficulties of everyday life, in looking for a job, in family life: even love stories have disappeared.”
The only moment al-Hessi smiles is when he talks about his workshops in refugee camps: “Our first show in 1995 was called Mothers. 200 women came to see it, and a long discussion started there too. Instead of an hour we stayed there for three hours because all the women wanted to talk. From there we started our storytelling programme for women. Now I have built a 20-minute show that stages our displacement in which women are once again the main characters and we will have three female actors on the stage. And I wrote another script, and I have three male actors on stage: it is a show tailored to the needs of children up to 12 years of age.”
Al-Hessi’s recipe is simple. At the end of the day, his bread is life: tragic, absurd, unexpected, constantly balanced between the grimace of pain and the laughter of survival.
22 Jul 2024 | Germany, News and features, Ukraine
The Babyn Yar massacre is one of the bloodiest atrocities in Ukraine’s dark history. In late September 1941, 33,771 Jewish residents of Kyiv were herded by the Nazis into a ravine (“Babi Yar” in Russian, “Babyn Yar” in Ukrainian) on the outskirts of the city. Over a two-day period, the victims were shot and buried in mass graves as part of what became known as “the Holocaust of Bullets”.
Oleg Chorny’s small-budget feature documentary From Babi Yar to Freedom tells the story of the massacre through the lens of Soviet defector and writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who first revealed the full scale of the atrocity to the world when he escaped to the UK in 1969. The film was completed in 2017, five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and is an extraordinary tribute to Kuznetsov’s determination to tell the truth in the face of a wall of Soviet censorship and disinformation.
Chorny’s documentary deserves a wide international audience, but in an irony that would not be lost on the dissidents of the 1960s, no one can see it because of a rights dispute over the central archive interview in the film owned by the giant US TV corporation CBS.
In July 1969, shortly after Kuznetsov defected, he gave a lengthy interview to the veteran CBS news journalist Morley Safer in which he opened up about his decision to escape the Soviet Union. Kuznetsov went to London, accompanied by a KGB minder, to research the time Lenin had spent there in 1903, and secretly took with him film containing the text of the full version of his book Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, stitched into his clothing. The book is based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre and Kuznetsov’s own boyhood diary.
Now, Chorny has been told that nine minutes of CBS footage from the Kuznetsov interview (freely available on YouTube) will cost $80,000 – more than the budget of the movie. Wazee Digital, a Colorado-based asset management company which negotiates on behalf of CBS, has refused to budge on this fee.
Chorny told Index that the fate of the film and the fate of Kuznetsov were intertwined in his mind. “I’m sorry, you must understand that the story with this film is a sad story for me because it was not released… But if something happened and this movie was released, I think it would be so important, because nothing has changed from these times with the KGB. You can call it the FSB, but it does not matter.”
In the documentary, Chorny follows Ukrainian writer Stanislav Tsalyk as he tracks down traces of Kuznetsov – who died in 1979 – in Kyiv and then in London. Tsalyk travels to the UK with Kuznetsov’s son Olexiy, who remained in the Soviet Union. In one of the most moving scenes, Olexiy stands next to his father’s unmarked grave in Highgate Cemetery. Olexiy, too, has now died without seeing the film released.
The story of Kuznetsov is a classic Cold War tale, but it is much more than that. It is a story about how stories themselves are told, how they can be misrepresented, and how they are suppressed.
Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar has had many lives and suffered multiple rounds of censorship. When it was first published in the Soviet Union in 1966, the censor made cuts that underplayed the suffering of the Jews. In the Soviet narrative, Babi Yar was known as a Nazi act of horror against Soviet citizens. The Jews of Kyiv were thus doubly erased: once literally and then historically. This was not all that was removed from the original text: references to cannibalism during the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, where millions died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies, and parallels between fascism and communism were all excised. Anything, in fact, that showed the Soviets as less than heroic.
The whole uncensored version is recognised as a singular masterpiece. The first chapter, Ashes, begins: “This book contains nothing but the truth.” The typefaces of the book reveal its troubled publication history, with the original text in plain type, previously censored passages rendered in bold, and later additions from Kuznetsov in square brackets.
Oddly, this adds to the experience of reading Babi Yar. Its fragmented text suits the battered and broken subject matter.
Take the following passage about Dina Pronicheva, a 30-year-old puppet-theatre actor and survivor of the massacre who later gave evidence against the Nazis. “Dina went across the hillock and sat down. Everybody there was silent, crazed with fright. She was afraid to look up: somebody might recognise her, quite by chance, and cry out: ‘She’s a dirty Jewess!’ These people would stop at nothing to save their own skins. For that reason she tried not to look at anybody, and nobody looked at her. Only an old woman sitting next to her in a fluffy knitted scarf complained quietly to Dina that she had been seeing her daughter-in-law off and had got caught… But she herself was a Ukrainian, she was no Jewess, and whoever thought it would come to this? They had all been seeing people off.”
The censored words in bold give the episode a very different meaning and emotional impact.
When Babi Yar was republished in a Vintage Classics edition in the UK last year under the title Babi Yar: The Story of Ukraine’s Holocaust, it didn’t receive the attention it deserved.
When I talked to Chorny in Kyiv over Zoom, I suggested that this latest episode in the story of the massacre is part of a pattern. I said: “Even if you go back to the origins of the story… This is a story about silence. It’s a story about censorship. It’s a story about not being able to tell the story and so…”
Chorny stopped me and said my interpretation did not go far enough: “Excuse me, this is a story of a totalitarian system which is the same as the Nazi totalitarian system. And this is a story of resistance – Anatoly Kuznetsov’s personal resistance, I mean: to escape to publish the full version in the West.”
Josephine Burton of Dash Arts has been pushing for the release of Chorny’s film since 2021, when her organisation began work on Songs of Babyn Yar, a music and theatre project that used Kuznetsov’s text in the production. Burton, who also championed the cause of the Crimean Tatars in Dash Arts’ 2022 performance Crimea 5am, told Index: “Oleg Chorny’s documentary needs to be seen. It tells a remarkable story, a vital contribution to the history of Ukraine and the Holocaust. This film should not be silenced.”
Chorny has also gained the support of the Koffler Centre in Toronto, which ran a series of events about the Babyn Yar massacre last year, including a Zoom discussion with Chorny and his team.
In the meantime, Chorny describes life in Kyiv: “We are living some kind of surrealistic reality. This is mixed with news from the front from our colleagues and friends. A lot of losses. Especially in the last year, we buried a lot of friends and some colleagues who disappeared on the front line.”
But the director has kept himself busy. Chorny has made a short film, Kyiv in the Days of War, about the aftermath of the Russian attacks in 2022, and three 15-minute films in a series about creativity and the Ukraine conflict: Art in the Land of War. In one of these, If I Stop It Means They Win, sculptor and graphic artist Oleksandr Smyrnov says: “I think that if they prevent me from doing what I’m good at and what I want to do, then they have won. That’s why I’ll keep doing it.”
Two years ago, an appeal to raise money for a headstone for Kuznetsov in Highgate cemetery raised more than $1,300. In another twist in the story, his surviving daughter has not given her permission for it to be erected. The best memorial would be the release of From Babi Yar to Freedom. [CBS was approached for a comment on this story.]
