The Iranian director Mitra Farahani photographed during her time at the Gijón film festival, in November 2022.Diego Sánchez and Borja Larrondo (The Kids Are Right)
The usual thing when a creator of any kind gives an interview is that he wants to talk about "his book".
Pushed by the logic of the journalistic market and looking for a bit of a wide range for his audience, the interviewer will look for him to talk about climate change, self-exploitation, sexual consent or the Big Topic he touches on, and the author, according to his temperament, or either band all that with education or remind the journalist: hey, what I've done is a movie or an essay or a comic, or whatever.
With Mitra Farahani (Tehran, 47 years old) it happens exactly the opposite.
The Iranian filmmaker, who now lives in Rome but has been linked to France and French cinema for many years, was in Gijón in November to present her documentary À vendredi, Robinson
at the International Film Festival there.
, a film experiment in which he finally managed to meet two of the film patriarchs who had been following and admiring each other since the sixties, the Iranian Ebrahim Golestan, representative of the new wave of cinema in his country at the end of the sixties, and Jean-Luc Godard, with whom Farahani worked closely in the last years of his life.
The filmmaker convinced them to accept a game: send each other an email every Friday.
She would be in both places at the same time, in the gigantic house in Sussex, England, where Golestan, who has turned 100, still lives, and in Rolle, the Swiss town where Godard secluded himself and in which who died, by assisted suicide, last September.
Like her first full length,
Fifi Howls from Happiness
(2013), in which he got closer to the enigmatic figure of the painter Bahman Mohasses, considered the Persian Picasso in pre-revolutionary Iran, the film addresses experience, the creator's contradictions and exiles, real and metaphorical.
They are dense films from which a lot of discourse springs.
But the director doesn't feel like talking about them right now.
01:07
Trailer of the documentary 'À vendredi, Robinson'
The centennial Iranian director, Ibrahim Golestan, in a still from the film “À vendredi, Robinson”.
While she is doing the festival circuit, presenting her film to the media, protests have been taking place in her country since mid-September, when the so-called "morality police" killed 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing wrong hijab.
Hundreds are counted dead and thousands retaliated.
The announcement in early December that the regime plans to do away with that police force was met with skepticism.
“It is very hard for us Iranians who are out of the country,” says the director.
"Our brain is 85% there, but then we have to lead another life outside of the field."
Farahani has lived between Iran and Europe since 2001, when she went to Paris to study cinema, but for years now she has not been able to visit her family in her home country or enter it with ease.
In 2009,
After the fraudulent elections in which Mahmud Ahmadinejad sought to revalidate his power, the filmmaker was arrested as soon as she set foot in Tehran and was imprisoned for two weeks.
“Even so, I continued to go see my family until 2019. We have been with a regime that we have not chosen for 43 years.
Right now, the whole country is in mourning and anger, and the only way out of that mourning is through revolution."
Farahani's cinema has never been comfortable for the regime.
She debuted in 2002 with a short documentary,
Just Une Femme
, which followed a trans woman preparing to go out on the streets in Tehran, covered in a chador, after her gender reassignment operation.
And in the second,
Tabous
(2004), several Iranian women talk about their sexuality against a Persian erotic poem as a backdrop.
Although hers is a religious, working-class family, her parents have never had a problem with her movies or her bare-headedness.
“People like my parents treat religion from a healthy angle.
In reality, the Islamic revolution has destroyed families like mine.
My mother instilled in me some values, but the Government has been in charge of corrupting them.
There have been many other families like this, who have felt used to try to give value to the regime.
Now you are being aware and you are moving away.
Religion, as it is presented to society, is a trompe l'oeil.
They use it to cover corruption and those who do evil”.
Farahani holds a sign with a photo of retaliated Iranian journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi. The Kids Are Right (Diego Sánchez and Borja Larrondo)
The director, born in 1975, has barely known anything else in her country than the Islamic revolution, which took place when she was three years old and marks the stages of her life in step with the situation in the country.
“My adolescence took place when the revolution had already been underway for about 10 years, and people of my generation have suffered serious psychological damage because of it.
I couldn't fall in love and let it show, go with someone down the street.
That was considered terrible and sinful.
The next generation somehow avoided that kind of persecution, but it is today's youth who are finally taking action.
Today's youth is the most awake and conscious that has existed since Khomeini.
They don't even believe in the opposition.
That figure has already been poisoned by the same speeches of the regime.
Irony is not lost on the director when she contemplates the rise of the extreme right in Europe and has followed with concern the election of the ultra-right government in Italy, where she has lived for years.
“I see that there are very young people who have handed over the government to Giorgia Meloni.
In Iran she is spilling blood to reclaim the country from the hands of the fascists, while in Italy it is given to her for free.
Meloni has been chosen with an ease that amazes me.
She is heartbreaking”.
Given this scenario, do you have hope?
Godard always said that hope is the only concrete thing.
Image from the documentary that Farahani dedicated to the painter Behjat Sadr, “Time Suspended”.
After seeing how the director did not open the door for his friend Agnès Varda and sent her away with a note on the door in the film of this
Faces and Places
(2017), it is striking that Farahani convinced Godard to let himself be filmed in his privacy.
The collaboration between the two continued in recent years and she was also a producer of
The Picture Book.
(2018), his latest film.
“I didn't know him at all.
I wrote him a letter in 2014 with this idea of putting into images a correspondence file that didn't really exist.
I think that, on the one hand, he had a presentiment towards the figure of Golestan, he sensed that he could be a good imaginary friend.
And another factor that he could influence for him to accept is that he understood everything as a great game.
He was very faithful and he sent his letter every Friday before midnight”.
In the film, the Frenchman answers Golestan's long and well-written emails with a video of a dolphin with a dog or a piece of a Matisse painting, without further explanation, to the despair of the Iranian, who laments that the communication Between the two it is not balanced, “it is not a table tennis”.
In both nests, Farahani believes, the same generosity and desire to say their last word to whoever wants to listen.
“Both have been enormously influential to me.
Golestan tries to introduce all the literary force within the filmic discourse.
He is a great connoisseur and interpreter of Persian poetry.
My great hope has been to try to touch all that knowledge and put it in my film.
It was a way to preserve his work and try to understand it.
And Godard… is Godard.
He gave us the greatest of freedoms, the freedom to be awake, not to stay in our comfort zone.
In all his films we find situations that are repeated.
Haven't you seen it?
I put it back to you.
On a personal level, his charisma and his way of living were admirable”.
Saying this, Farahani asks to pose with the photos of two journalists retaliated in Iran, Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi.
Haven't you seen it?
I put it back to you.
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