BAHMAN GHOBADI. WAITING FOR THE LIGHT
Do not make me be silent. I have a story to tell.
The Rebellion (Forough Farrokhzad, 1959)
Bahman Ghobadi belongs to the subsequent generation of great Iranian directors from the Second Wave, whose standard was hoisted by Abbas Kiarostami and, after him, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi, amongst many others. His works disembarked in Europe and fascinated both audience and critics at the end of the 90s. At that time, after studying film and photography in Teheran, Ghobadi films twenty short and medium-length films, in 8mm and 16mm, and experiences two fundamental moments at the end of the last century: in 1998, he manages to become Kiarostami’s assistant director on The Wind Will Carry Us (Bad ma ra khahad bord, 1999), which was filmed in Iranian Kurdistan and, in 2000, he presents the first Kurdish feature film in Iranian cinema at Cannes, A Time for Drunken Horses (Zamani barayé masti asbha, 2000), which also wins the Cámara d’Or and the FIPRESCI Award. His idea of using film to reflect Kurdish society and culture is then strengthened and he begins a career where he combines messages that are universally valid —rejection of war, the effects of conflict during childhood, displacement or the substitution of traditional values for those of consumer society— with stories of his people. These include the short film Daf (2003), one of the clearest examples that Ghobadi always works with fictional material with a documentary basis. Often —here, for example— not with actors but with people acting out their own lives: this also happens in No One Knows About Persian Cats (Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh, 2009) and in A Flag Without a Country (2015). However, the Iranian political situation ends up having a notably adverse effect on Ghobadi’s development as a filmmaker. It is 2009 when he films —in just a few days and without the film cameras that belong to the state— No One Knows About Persian Cats, the culmination of some of the constants in his work: popular music, docufiction and the defence of individual freedom. It is convulsive 2009, when Mahmud Ahmadineyad was re-elected. Bahman Ghobadi is arrested by the police when he returns from the Cannes Festival. There he had won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section and made the most of his stay in France to provide harsh criticism of his country’s government for the wave of repression against opposition movements, particularly for the 8-year prison sentence imposed on American journalist Roxana Saberi, co-writer on the film he was presenting, whom Iran had accused of being a spy for the United States. In the end, Saberi spent about six months in prison and Ghobadi – a few days in a cell. That is why the director of the moving tragedy on war and childhood Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha ham parvaz mikonand, 2004) and the indomitable comedy road-movie Half Moon (Niwemang, 2006) —both winners of the Concha de Oro at San Sebastián— decided not to return to Iran: “I am a person made bitter by 30 years of the regime,” he maintained in 2009, after joining the sadly abundant group of filmmakers born in Iran who have had no option but exile. They include Mohsen Makhmalbaf (the director of Gabbeh, 1996, or Kandahar, 2001), Babak Payami (director of Secret Ballot —Raye makhfi— 2001), which was awarded in Venice, and Jafar Panahi, under house arrest in Teheran for “acting against national security and using propaganda against the state.” As Ghobadi moves to America, then to Germany and, finally, to Turkey he prepares several films inspired by the need to condemn different situations of repression suffered by Kurds living in the territory located in the Turkish, Syrian, Iraki and Iranian states. From a position of greater freedom, and without having to worry about censure, he presents Rhino Season (Fasle kargadan, 2012). In his latest works, he has again —with conviction— taken up combining fiction and documentary in A Flag Without A Country (2015), which he presented at the Busan and Sundance Festivals. At the same time, he produced Life on the Border (2015), filmed on the border between Turkey and Syria with eight children who live at one of the starting points for refugees attempting to reach Europe: the Rojava camps. The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami’s classic with Ghobadi as assistant director, takes its name from a poem by the unfortunate Iranian filmmaker and poet Forough Farrokhzad. Her poetry was also forbidden and censured for more than a decade after the Islamic revolution. One of the verses recited in her unforgettable short documentary The House Is Black (Khaneh siah ast, 1963) —filmed in a leper colony in the city of Tabriz— could be used today to describe the situation of creators in Iran: “Like turtledoves, we beg for justice But there is not any justice We await the light And darkness reigns.”
Rubén Corral & Ramón Ganuza
Curators
