Iran has hailed the country’s first Oscar-winning film as a triumph over arch-foe Israel after an Academy Award race with its own subplots: Iranian officials giving a grudging nod to cinema and Israeli audiences flocking to see a made-in-Tehran drama.
On Monday, Iran’s state-spun praise for A Separation, which beat out an Israeli film and three others in the foreign-language category, was mostly wrapped in patriotic boasting as a conquest for Iranian culture and a blow for Israel’s perceived outsized influence in the US.
Yet the high-profile attention by the Islamic leadership also represented a rare stamp of approval for Iran’s movie industry.
Iranian filmmakers have collected awards and accolades worldwide for decades, but Iranian hardliners often denounce domestic cinema as dominated by Western-tainted liberals and political dissenters. Some directors and actors have faced arrest or fled the country. Last month, a well-known independent film group in Tehran, the House of Cinema, was ordered closed.
Iranian hardliners had already taken pot shots at director Asghar Farhadi’s film even as it racked up international prizes and pre-Oscar buzz. The film explores troubles in Iranian society through the story of a collapsing marriage. Iranian conservatives were upset with the themes of domestic turmoil, gender inequality and the desire by many Iranians to leave the country.
The divide touches on much deeper fissures in Iran.
Iran’s young and highly educated population — nearly half born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution — feel increasingly estranged from a theocracy that allows no room for political opposition, has tried to muzzle the Internet and is growing more isolated by its defiant nuclear policies.
Farhadi, in his acceptance speech on Sunday in Los Angeles, said he hoped the Oscar would raise awareness of Iran’s sizable artistic achievements and rich culture that has been “hidden under the heavy dust of politics.”
That has been the case in of all places, Israel, which feels its very existence threatened by Iran.
The Iranian film has drawn tens of thousands of Israeli moviegoers since it opened in the middle of this month. Some came to see the Oscar competition for Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote, the saga of a Talmudic scholar, but many were drawn by a chance to glimpse inside Iranian society.
“It’s very well acted, exceptionally well written and very moving,” Israeli film critic Yair Raveh said. “Ultimately you don’t think about nuclear bombs or dictators threatening world peace. You see them driving cars and going to movies and they look exactly like us.”
After a Sunday screening in Jerusalem, 70-year-old Rina Brick said she was surprised by the humanity of the Iranian bureaucrats portrayed in the film.
“Our image of how Iran works is less democratic than we see here,” she said. “The judge, the police, everyone behaves as if they are in a Western country.”
Still, Iran’s nuclear program was on the minds of some. Israel has not ruled out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the West fears could be used to develop weapons. Tehran insists they are for peaceful purposes like energy production.
Moshe Amirav, a political science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said he “didn’t stop thinking about the bomb the whole time” he was watching A Separation.”
“I said, what a contrast that we see this Iranian film with such admiration, and then when we leave we think about how they want to kill us,” Amirav said.
Iranian cinema has reaped praise and prizes at top festivals for decades, but while the government often highlights sporting achievements and technological leaps as a source of national pride, it is typically dismissive of international cultural and entertainment awards.
However, taking the Oscar over an Israeli rival was too powerful for state image builders to ignore.
A state TV broadcast said the award succeeded in “leaving behind” a film from Israel. Javad Shamaghdari, head of the state Cinematic Agency, portrayed the Oscar win as the “beginning of the collapse” of Israeli influence that “beats the drum of war” in the US and elsewhere.
Still, Iranian artists and many fans did not try to score any propaganda points and were simply delighted by the country’s first Oscar.
Tahmineh Milani, director of the acclaimed 2005 film Unwanted Woman, said the Oscar was a source of “national pride” that “revived hope in the hearts of all Iranians.”
“I feel fresh air in my lungs,” said Erfan Khazaei, an art student at Azad University, who watched the Oscar ceremony on satellite TV with four friends. “Now we are more hopeful about the future.”
While A Separation’s themes are not overtly political, ultra-conservatives denigrated the film as an indirect slap at the country.
Prominent hardline sociologist Ebrahim Fayyaz called it a “black realistic film” that portrays the country as an old man, a symbol of tradition and the past who is afflicted with a mind-crippling disease.
He said the movie suggests emigrating to the West as a solution.
“The West awards movies that are in the direction of their policies,” he told the Nasim news agency.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion