Iranian Film Festival Screens "Anti-Iranian" Film Rosewater

This week, Iran launched its 13th Resistance International Film Festival. The festival’s organizers call the event “one of the most prestigious international film festivals in Iran” and say its mission is to explain “the Islamic Revolution discourse” and “resistance culture” to audiences. The festival also aims to “expose the cultural, political, economic and media invasion of resistant movement enemies.”

Among those enemies, it seems, are former Daily Show host Jon Stewart and IranWire’s founder Maziar Bahari, who collaborated on the 2014 film Rosewater, which depicts Bahari’s 118-day detention by Iranian security forces following Iran’s contested 2009 election. The film is based on Bahari’s 2011 memoir, Then They Came For Me.

The festival screened Rosewater at an event called “Resistance International Film Festival Reviews the Western Imagery of Iran,” which was hosted by Shahab Esfandiary, a British-educated professor of film and theatre at the University of Arts in Tehran.

“Counter-Revolutionary, Islamophobic, Iranophobic”?

The festival program describes Rosewater as an “anti-Iranian” film, using a term Iranian state media outlets have applied to a long line of films from Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006) a garish comic book–inspired portrayal of the battle between Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC, to Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), an ahistorical thriller based on a real-life CIA scheme to evacuate American hostages hiding in the Canadian ambassador’s house in Tehran in 1979.

“Screening counter-revolutionary, Islamophobic and Iranophobic films in the Resistance Film Festival helps expand knowledge and analysis and clarifies the portrayal of Iran in foreign countries,” Esfandiary said in comments published on the RIFF website.

IranWire put Esfandiary’s descriptions of Rosewater to Bahari for a response. 

“Definitely it's counter-revolutionary,” Bahari says. “When people look back at the 1979 Islamic Revolution they think it was a historical mistake, and I think the majority of Iranians are counter-revolutionary, so that’s okay. But it's not Islamophobic because the film is not about all Muslims. It's about a very specific group of people who are doing things in the name of Islam. It shows the Iranian people in a very good light, and it shows that the majority of the Iranian people want to have a more democratic, more open society.”

Of Spies and Journalists

Esfandiary, who holds a PhD in critical theory and film studies from the University of Nottingham, and has published a book entitled Iranian Cinema and Globalization, also says on the festival website that in Rosewater, Bahari plays the role of a spy. Esfandiary calls him a “native informant.”

“When I read his comments, he sounds like my interrogator,” Bahari says, referring to the man he nicknamed Rosewater, who beat and threatened him throughout his imprisonment to extract a false confession. “It’s sad to see that a film critic sounds like a torturer. My interrogator told me that there was no difference between a spy and a journalist. He said a journalist gathers information and sells it, and a spy does the same thing. For a very narrow-minded person who lives his life in small dark interrogation cells, that might be something natural to say, but you expect a little bit more from someone who has studied the history of cinema.”

Esfandiary, who has lectured in cultural studies at the University of Nottingham, also says the film “denies Iranian agency.”

“The film is really about agency,” Bahari says. “It shows that the whole Green Movement was about agency. In the film and in the book, I say that it is the Iranian people who are going to make change in the country and the process of change has already started.”

The film depicts popular protests over the re-election of Iran’s incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2009, which became known as the Green Movement because of the green clothes worn by supporters of the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Seemingly drawing on fears of foreign invasion dating back to the 2000s, Esfandiary also says Rosewater implies that any change in Iran “must be imposed on [Iranians] from the outside.”

“I don't know how he saw that,” Bahari says. “There is nothing in the film that says change has to be imposed from outside. In the book I clearly say that I'm against any kind of intervention, and that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by US led forces was a disaster and a mistake.”

Cultural Studies at War

Drawing implicitly on the Iranian revolutionary concept of “Westoxification” first advanced by the Islamic revolutionary intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad, Esfandiary also argues that Rosewater embodies a colonial mentality. What Iranian security forces in the film find when they search Bahari’s family home particularly disturbs him.

“Cultural items available at his house are all western,” Esfandiary observes. “This shows [that people living in the house] are culturally imprisoned by the west. For example, what does it mean to have the book Tintin in the Congo in your bookcase, which is one of the most controversial books in the world because of its racist nature? I think the character of Bahari as depicted in the film is similar to the [character] Tintin in this book.”

“When I look at Tintin in the Congo now, of course it has racist elements,” Bahari says. “But as kids we loved Tintin, and the reason Tintin in the Congo is in that room is that that was the only Tintin book the prop department could find in Persian. They could not find my favorite Tintin book, which is The Black Island.” 

Esfandiary, Bahari says, is reading too much into his childhood enthusiasms. “I remember in the 1980s, Peter Wollen's 1969 book Signs and Meanings in the Cinema was translated into Persian. Many Iranian critics are still very much influenced by that book and sometimes they over-read signs and their meanings.”

Is Hollywood Iran’s Enemy?

One of the more peculiar charges Esfandiary makes is that “Princes of Jordan,” provided the film’s budget. “There is no truth in the suggestion,” Bahari says. “The film was produced by Scott Rubin and the financer was Odd Lot, which is owned by Gigi Pritzker. Esfandiary is lying. It's very sad that some people in Iran lie so blatantly because they think that no one can really fact check their lies. This is one of those cases.”

Even so, ever since the Iranian Revolution, Iranians have sometimes shuddered to see how they are depicted on screen in the West. Critics often cite Not Without My Daughter, a 1991 film about a custody struggle between an American woman and her Iranian-American husband, as an unfair portrayal of Iran. More recently, Iranian officials have denounced Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical animation Persepolis (2007) as “Islamophobic,” and have reacted similarly to other films touching on Iran.

“Not Without My Daughter was not the best film I have ever seen in my life,” Bahari says. “But the problem is that the Iranian government is doing so many horrible things that they provide subjects for film producers to make these kind of films. If they had not arrested and imprisoned and tortured me, Rosewater would never have been made.”

IranWire called Shahab Esfandiary to request an interview, but he declined.