20 Sep 24 | News and features, Ukraine, United Kingdom
It was a genuine privilege to co-host the UK premiere of the film From Babyn Yar to Freedom this week in collaboration with the theatre company Dash Arts. Made by Ukrainian director Oleg Chorny in 2017, the film tells the life story of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov and his mission to bring the world’s attention to the full horror of the Babyn Yar massacre of September 1941. Kuznetsov defected to the UK in 1969 with the smuggled, uncensored text of his masterpiece, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.
Babyn Yar was a ravine in Kyiv that witnessed the “Holocaust by bullets” of 100,000 predominantly Jewish people. However, before the publication of Kuznetsov’s book in the West, the Moscow authorities had insisted on the essentially Soviet-Ukrainian identity of the victims.
The private screening of the film was made possible by the Jewish Community centre, JW3, which hosted the invitation-only premiere. The remarkable film traces Kuznetsov’s life in Kyiv and London by talking to those who knew him, including his son Olexiy, whom the writer left behind in the Soviet Union when he fled to the West.
Unfortunately, it has not been possible to release the film more widely because of a dispute over footage from a 1969 interview with Kuznetsov by CBS News journalist Morley Safer. Index and Dash hope publicity around the screening will held break the deadlock over the rights to the interview.
The screening was followed by a discussion led by Josephine Burton, the artistic director of Dash Arts, who used Kuznetsov’s words in the 2021 production Songs for Babyn Yar. Burton has been a tireless advocate for the film and contacted me after I launched a fundraiser for Kuznetsov’s unmarked grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Director Oleg Chorny and assistant producer Natalia Klymchuk fielded questions from the audience over video link from Kyiv.
Several mysteries still surround the story of Kuznetsov. Was he right to suspect he was being targeted by the KGB in London? Was his death from a heart attack at 49 in 1979 suspicious? And why does his surviving daughter not want his grave marked?
Index will follow up on suggestions from audience members about the rights issues over the interview footage and we call on CBS to do the decent thing and ensure the film is released to the wider television and cinematic audience it deserves.
You can read about From Babyn Yar to Freedom in the latest edition of Index. Dash Arts is currently working on a new project on Ukraine, The Reckoning in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, based on testimonies of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
18 Sep 24 | Iran, News and features, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
In a perceptive video essay titled Irani Bag, made in 2020, Maryam Tafakory illustrates how Iranian filmmakers get around the Islamic taboo on touch. Interweaving her commentary with film clips from 1989 to 2018, she highlights how bags have long been a recurring device in Iranian films, allowing men and women to “touch” on screen.
In one clip, a man and a woman riding on a motorbike are separated – or connected – by a bag lying between them. It functions as a substitute for human touch or an object of shared intimacy.
A bag can also be an extension of the body, and Tafakory demonstrates how men and women in these scenes repeatedly push, pull or strike each other using bags.
By contrast, in the scenes she shows without a bag, hands hover centimetres away from another person – the actors forbidden from touching.
If no direct contact materialises on screen, the filmmaker can dodge censorship. And, as Tafakory shows, Iranian cinema has developed a cinematic language “to touch without touching”.
Touch is not the only prohibition in Iranian cinema. The government has sought to align cinema and other arts with its interpretation of Islamic principles, and an overarching rule is gender segregation, which prevents men and women who are not mahram (related by blood or marriage) from interacting with each other.
As part of this, the wearing of the veil in public is strictly policed, as witnessed by Mahsa Jina Amini’s police custody death in 2022 and the ensuing Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Since cinema is regarded as a public space, female characters are always expected to be veiled – even indoors with their families where they would not wear veils in real life.
Cinema is regulated by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG). Directors must submit their synopsis or screenplay for a production permit and, later, their completed film for a screening permit. At each stage they can be asked to make changes or otherwise risk censorship. When a film is released, the Iranian press can accuse the makers of siāh-namāyi: presenting the country in a negative light.
There are some obvious red lines for the censors: no direct criticism of Islam or Iran’s Islamic Republic, nothing too violent, and certainly no sex. But MCIG guidelines are not detailed, so moviemakers have learned other censorship criteria through trial and error.
What is permissible is always shifting due to changes in society and filmmakers pushing against boundaries.
It is important to observe that state censorship is not the only obstacle that Iranian filmmakers encounter. International funders and markets impose expectations of what their films should be about. Indeed, many filmmakers have reported to me that they find these restrictions to be as challenging as censorship.
But where censorship is concerned, filmmakers who want to explore intimacy and other sensitive topics must find creative ways to work around imposed constraints. This is reminiscent of Hollywood under the Production Code from 1934 to 1966 when political, religious and cultural restrictions on filmmaking compelled directors to employ subtle techniques that left more to viewers’ imaginations.
In Iranian cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, it was noticeable how often key roles were given to children. This was partly a creative response to new taboos as, in the early decades of the Islamic Republic, filmmakers realised that children could overcome constraints of gender segregation by acting as adult substitutes or purifiers of male-female contact.
For example, when the protagonist Nobar shares intimate moments with her lover Rasul in The Blue Veiled (1995), her youngest sibling, Senobar, serves as a mediator. Senobar even rests her head in Rasul’s lap, a proxy for her sister. The child lends an innocent aura to an erotically charged scene.
Children can also cross social boundaries and navigate between private and public spaces. In Jafar Panahi’s debut feature The White Balloon (1995), a little girl, Razieh, embarks on a quest to buy a goldfish for Nowruz (Persian New Year) and encounters people from different walks of life on Tehran’s streets, including an Afghan balloon seller.
Filmmakers have subtly used children to highlight Iran’s sociopolitical realities, among them the after-effects of the Iran-Iraq war (as in the 1989 film Bashu, the Little Stranger), the plight of the country’s Afghan minorities (The White Balloon) and the Kurds’ hardships on the Iran-Iraq border (for example, A Time for Drunken Horses from 2000, or 2004’s Turtles Can Fly).
The political climate has waxed and waned as moderate and hardline governments have relaxed censorship restrictions and tightened them again. Yet intermediaries for male-female contact have been enduring ploys throughout.
In one of several storylines in Tehran: City of Love (2018), a woman called Mina dates a man, Reza, who ultimately confesses he is married. As consolation, he couriers her a giant teddy bear. Subsequently, Mina is seen waiting at a bus shelter side-by-side with the gargantuan soft toy – Reza’s comic stand-in.
Another creative solution has been the use of the road movie genre. Simultaneously private and public, a car is a space that allows small, everyday transgressions. Being in a car relaxes the rules of compulsory veiling and encourages behaviour normally kept behind closed doors. It emboldens people to express themselves more freely. Filmmakers tap its emancipatory potential in both their production strategies and their on-screen representations.
In Ten (2002), a female passenger, whose fiancé has jilted her, removes her headscarf to reveal her head shaved in mourning and as a token of a new beginning. In Panahi’s Taxi Tehran (2015) – his third feature made clandestinely since his 2010 filmmaking ban – a series of passengers take a taxi. The cabbie is Panahi himself, masquerading in a beret. Before his ban, he was accustomed to filming in the bustling outdoors. With the car and small digital cameras, he can shoot outside again.
One of his passengers is lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, renowned for her work defending political prisoners. Like Panahi, she has been repeatedly imprisoned and banned from leaving Iran and practising her profession. As she gets out, she advises him to delete her words from his film to avoid more hassle from authorities. This is an underground film – made illegally, without official permits, and distributed on Iran’s black market and abroad. So Sotoudeh’s words survive the edit, registering the film’s furtive mode of production.
In Atomic Heart (2015), we first encounter Arineh and Nobahar intoxicated after a party. They are part of a modern, Westernised subculture that likes to revel, drink and take drugs, and largely rejects the Islamic Republic’s values. As their anti-regime attitude cannot be directly shown, the film hints at their unconventional lifestyle by inhabiting the road movie genre – associated with freedom and rebellion – as they whirl around nocturnal Tehran. The film evokes the subversive behaviour of real-life Iranian youth who, given restrictions on public gathering as well as bans on nightclubs and disapproval of open displays of romantic affection, have taken to the highways, especially at night.
Inserting a story within a story is a further tactic for circumventing censorship. In The Salesman (2016), Emad and Rana perform Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in an amateur theatre group. The film mirrors the play, highlighting the couple’s relationship after Rana is assaulted by an intruder in their apartment – a scene left unshown to avoid censorship and engage the audience in speculating about what transpired between Rana and her attacker. In the story within a story, meaning is multi-layered, residing in the inner as well as the outer tale.
Since short films are less strictly regulated by screening permit requirements, directors are bypassing these rules by composing feature films from several shorts. Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil (2020) comprises four short stories about characters involved in the state’s capital punishment system. Given Rasoulof’s filmmaking ban, his production team tactically applied for four short film permits without listing his name on the forms.
In Tales (2014), which was also created as multiple shorts joined together as a feature, a documentary filmmaker character shoots a film within a film. When an official notices his camera filming a workers’ protest, the recording halts. The film segues to the next story, suggesting the camera’s confiscation. Later, the filmmaker retrieves his camera without the seized footage. He determines to continue filming, stating: “No film will ever stay in the closet. Someday, somehow, whether we’re here or not, these films will be shown.” His words reflect a popular Iranian saying that a film’s purpose is to be shown to an audience.
These kinds of strategies are testament to Iranian filmmakers’ creativity. Although they cannot be overtly critical of the regime, they have developed resourceful ways to try to ensure that their films can explore sensitive topics and still be shown.
19 Nov 21 | Brazil, News and features
There is a highly symbolic scene in Marighella, a Brazilian film that has only reached movie theatres now, even though it has been ready for release since 2019. An American agent (Charles Paraventi) praises Police Chief Lúcio (Bruno Gagliasso) for the inventiveness with which the revolutionary group Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) infiltrated radio stations, broadcasting a subversive message using only a tape recorder and circumventing the censorship. The sequence fulfils at least two functions: to reinforce the deep ties between the brutality of the Brazilian military dictatorship and North American imperialist interests; and reinforcing political and social resistance through creativity, a typically Brazilian trait often described as jeitinho or malandragem – a way of circumventing the bureaucratic norms.
I evoke this idea of trickery because it is at the centre of the imbroglio involving the release of Marighella, a political biopic of Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian Marxist-Leninist communist, politician and writer.
Marighella, born in 1911, was regularly in and out of jail between the 1930s and 1950s for criticising the Brazilian government as an active member of the Communist Party.
In 1966, he published The Brazilian Crisis, which argued for an armed struggle against Brazil’s military dictatorship which had been installed as a result of the 1964 coup in the country. Two years later, Marighella was expelled from the Communist Party and he went on to found the ALN, which became involved in robbing banks to finance guerilla warfare and the kidnapping of high profile individuals to win the release of political prisoners.
After the ALN’s involvement in the kidnapping of US Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, Marighella became a target. On 4 November 1969, he was ambushed by the police in São Paulo and shot dead.
The release of the biopic during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, an apologist of Latin American military dictatorships and nostalgic for the bloodthirsty Brazilian regime that acts as the de facto villain of the film, is timely.
Marighella was supposed to be released in early 2020 but Ancine, the government agency that works to promote national cinema in Brazil, withheld funding of R$1 million (roughly £134,000) for its distribution, alleging a problem in the accounts for another production by O2 Filmes, the film’s producer.
Celebrated actor Wagner Moura, who debuts here as the director, had no doubt that the film was censored.
“It was a time when Bolsonaro was talking about filtering and regulating Ancine,” Moura said at a press event about the movie.
Brazil hasn’t had a censorship department since the end of the military dictatorship, which ended with popular elections in the mid-1980s. The constitution that was enacted at that time was so influenced by the “years of lead” (as the times under the regime are known) that censorship was expressly prohibited by the law.
There are, of course, age rating systems and, with the justification of “protecting the innocence of children”, certain films, events or exhibitions are only released for certain ages, and/or with parents’ authorisation, very much alike the ratings systems in the US or the UK. That’s why, as long as it feels the need to comply with the Constitution, the current far-right Brazilian government needs to be at least as creative as the speeches it seeks to curb.
Hence Moura’s revolt, saying that there would be “veiled censorship”, different than what happened during the dictatorship, applied as a state policy.
“Today they infiltrate people in these agencies, and they make anything impossible to happen. That’s what they did with Marighella. They found a way to make the release impossible, from a bureaucratic point of view,” he said in an interview with Veja magazine.
Without this being state policy, made official by documents, it is difficult to say that there is de facto censorship. Carlos Marighella symbolises much of what the radical wing of the government despises, finding it absurd that public money is used to finance “non-aligned” works.
Bolsonaro himself has even threatened Ancine with extinction because the productions it finances are no longer “aligned” with the government. His government’s special secretary of culture, former actor Mário Frias has even tweeted a response to Moura’s statements: “Did you think I was going to get public funds for this pamphlet garbage?”
This type of declaration by a state representative helps to understand the Brazilian Government’s relationship with culture. Its origin lies in one of the ideological consequences of the end of the military dictatorship, in which some far-right intellectuals and disgraced military personnel came to the conclusion that the left had “won” the “cultural war”, infiltrating universities and fostering ideologically aligned artistic production .
This conclusion was, in part, a reaction to the establishment of the National Truth Commission, dedicated to revealing and documenting the crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship, and the result of a bad reading (and also in bad faith, it should be said) of the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist intellectual.
The rise and permanence of the extreme right in power, they think, would be conditioned to the dismantling of an apparatus of cultural incentive and promotion, developed over the years of redemocratisation. This explains the presence of someone like Frias in charge of culture and the use of jeitinho to impede the exhibition of “misaligned” films such as Marighella.
This institutional trickery, in this case at least, has backfired, since a work is not an isolated object of its historical context. Since release – without the benefit of government funding – Marighella has become the most watched Brazilian production of the last two years, with 100,000 spectators in 300 theatres across the country. This is low in a historic context, as the screen quota which usually ensures that cinemas show a certain amount of locally produced content to counter the influx of foreign films is currently suspended while a new proposal, suggest by Brazil’s opposition parties, is considered.
Despite its success, the film has problems – from the annoying overacting to the lack of real interest in its main character – and it perhaps wouldn’t be so celebrated in another time. In Brazil at the end of 2021, with all the absurdities committed by action or inaction of the Bolsonaro government, Marighella has become the film to be seen.
16 Feb 21 | News and features, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116256″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]I can think of few public figures I hold in greater contempt than Ken Loach. Mr Loach may be an esteemed film maker but I regard his politics as those of the sewer. His involvement in the cancelled original production of Perdition, the notoriously antisemitic play, ought to have led all decent people to shun him. Far from that happening, however, he has been widely feted and his career has soared. And yet not only do his views remain the same, he misses few opportunities to promote them.
In short, I loathe the man and find him deeply offensive.
All of which is true, but all of which should be irrelevant to anyone but me and those who are interested in my views of Mr Loach. There are many other public figures whose views I find deeply offensive. To which you rightly respond: Who cares?
Except people do care. Not about my specific response, but about the offence Mr Loach generates among many of my fellow Jews. And that is an issue.
Earlier this month, a brouhaha arose over a decision by students at St Peter’s College, Oxford, to invite Mr Loach to speak (as it happens, about his films rather than, er, Jews). Would I have invited him? I think you know the answer to that. But the invitation was issued, Mr Loach accepted, and we are where we are.
Vile as I – and, let’s be clear, many others – may find him to be, if a group of Oxford students wish to hear from Ken Loach, so be it. He has broken no laws when speaking and has as much right to put forward his views – and, of course, to talk about his films to a group of people interested in hearing from him about them – as anyone else.
Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the matter. But when the event was made public, the Board of Deputies of British Jews weighed in, demanding that the invitation be withdrawn. They argued – correctly – that many Jews find Mr Loach’s views deeply offensive. But, bizarrely and ludicrously, they concluded from this that he should therefore have been banned from speaking.
The sheer idiocy of this position takes some grappling with. For most of my time as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, a recurring story has been how representatives of Israel face violence and intimidation on campus to stop them speaking. In other words, one group of people believe that the offence they take at hearing a certain view entitles them to silence that view. The Board of Deputies has rightly criticised such attempts.
Do they really not see the contradiction? For Jewish students, the greatest campus battle at the moment is the right to be heard. All too often they are shouted down and attacked by anti-Israel activists. The Board of Deputies’ position is that if someone is regarded as offensive by enough people, they should be denied the opportunity to speak. Presumably anywhere, always. If Mr Loach is to be denied the chance to speak at St Peter’s, is he also to be barred from promoting his films? Or from making films?
As one can see, the whole thing unravels with a moment’s thought – as well as being so obviously counter-productive. It will not be long before the next attempt to silence an Israeli speaker, this time doubtless claiming to be based on the Board of Deputies’ own logic, that their presence is offensive to many people.
As readers of this site well know, free speech issues can be complicated. But not always. Sometimes the issue is obvious. I loathe Ken Loach. But I defend his right to speak.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
