Anti-Islamic Republic Movie to Screen at Cannes Film Festival

The 60th annual Cannes Film Festival opened on Wednesday. For the second year in a row, no movie from the Islamic Republic was selected for screening in this prestigious art festival. For the first time, however, an anti-Islamic Republic movie made by an emigrant Iranian woman was picked for the competition section.

Iranian comic artist Marjane Satrapi is set to make her film debut with “Persepolis,” an animated version of her graphic novel with the same title. Persepolis’s name is already being thrown around as a possible candidate for the Palme d’Or [“Golden Palm”], the highest prize given to a competing film at the Cannes Film Festival.

Persepolis is set for screening in theatres across Europe, though it has already been screened in the United States through Sony Pictures Classic,the associate producer of the film and its distributor.The other producer of the film is Kathleen Kennedy.

Persepolis features some of France’s most prominent actors and actresses, including Gena Rowlands and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux and Tilly Mandelbrot. Catherine Deneuve, who is a fan of Satrapi’s work, told the French magazine Citizen, “Marjane Satrapi is probably my favorite fiction writer.” Deneuve also praised Satrapi’s intelligent mix of the themes of hopelessness, humor and loneliness in her books.

Though many prominent filmmakers and media critics will be present at the 60th Cannes Film Festival, for the second year in a row no Iranian movie was chosen for the competition section. World-renowned Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, will screen a short movie he made at the request of the Festival. Iranian actress, Niki Karimi, who published an open letter protesting the ban on her movie in Iran, is one of the Festival’s judges.

Persepolis is Satrapi’s first movie, which is based on her own life story. Marjane Satrapi is not a well-known name in Iran, but she is perhaps the best-known Iranian artist in France – even more so than Abbas Kiarostami, whose fame is limited to certain artistic circles.

Perspepolis was first published in 2000 by French publishers Ciboulette, and suddenly became a phenomenon. It was republished multiple times and was followed by three other graphic novels in the same series. Persepolis’s first volume sold more than 400 thousand copies in France alone. Globally, it was been translated into 16 languages and sold more than a million copies.

Persepolis is the coming-of-age story of a young Iranian girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The story then follows her as she cleverly outsmarts the “social guardians” of the Islamic Revolution and discovers punk and Western music, lives through the tragedies of the Iran-Iraq war, and emigrates outside Iran to find a new identity in Europe.

Satrapi was asked whether Persepolis is a family story or a political tale. She responded, “It is neither, and at the same time it is both. I have always had to deal with an inaccurate image of my country. First, Iran was an oil-rich and wealthy nation with powerful kings and beautiful queens, the land of 1001 nights. After the 1979 revolution, the same 1001 nights nation was turned into the worst nation with insane people who are thirsty for the blood of Westerners. Iran is neither a land of 1001 nights, nor a country of terrorist, and at the same time it is a combination of both. I was in Iran at time when I witnessed both a revolution and a war, which forced me to leave my country. Taking all of these issues into account, my work reflects the reality that I have witnessed in my life.”