Hardliners Call Rosewater "Delusional Propaganda"

The film Rosewater, which tells the story of Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-Canadian filmmaker and journalist jailed during the Green Revolution protests in 2009, hit North American cinemas in November, and is due for release in the UK this spring. The film, comedian and actor Jon Stewart’s directoral debut, is based on Bahari’s memoir, And Then They Came For Me.

Given its tendency to censor, it is perhaps surprising that the regime has allowed the film to be shown in Iran – though not in public theaters. It was shown to a select audience on February 15 at the 34th annual gathering of the Cinema Reyavat Organization, which brands itself as “the Film Society of the Revolution & the Sacred Defense [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war].” A panel discussion chaired by Rasoul Shademani and featuring film producer Shafi Agha Mohammadian and journalist Abbas Karimi Abbasi followed the event.

For hardliner media and activists, watching Rosewater offered an excellent opportunity to further expose enemies of the Islamic Republic, and identify new ones, a cathartic process that can only further strengthen the regime. Below, IranWire summarizes the Reyavat event as reported by Fars News Agency and the review by film critic Morteza Esmaeil-Doost in the Vatan Emrooz newspaper. The critics share the same view: the film exposes the hollowness of Hollywood, the pervasiveness of Zionism and the dangers of propaganda.

Propaganda (and a failed pursuit)

Anyone who has seen a Western film knows what to expect, wrote film critic Morteza Esmaeil-Doost in Vatan Emrooz newspaper — and Rosewater is no exception. A piece of Western propaganda that attempts to “destroy the dynamic foundations of the Islamic Republic,” the critic suggested Rosewater is the most recent by-product of a Hollywood political agenda.

Having recently failed to persuade the world of its military might, the West has employed a “media missile” to spread propaganda, Esmaeil-Doost wrote. From pre-production to finished product, Rosewater represents “large-scale mobilization” to attack Iranian people and their beliefs.

“The film is an adaptation of Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival by Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested in the 2009 disturbances, and who was released on bail after 100 days in prison and left the country illegally.”

“Rosewater tries its best to question Islamic views and the justice of the Iranian system,” Esmaeil-Doost wrote. These political goals, he wrote, are attempted through the “emotional scenes in which Bahari is psychologically tortured by security agents.”

But, he wrote, the “delusional filmmaker” is out of his depth, giving a “false image of the prison” and “portraying Bahari’s interrogators as corrupt idiots.” “They think that the novelist Chekhov is a spy and are excited when Bahari talks about sex.“

“But the comedian — who decided to become a filmmaker overnight — is so ignorant that he cannot distinguish between rosewater and other perfumes. Bahari calls his interrogator “rosewater” because of the way he smelled, but we see him using a fragrance spray. Unconsciously, the director gives us the idea that this “rosewater” originates not from Iranian flowerbeds but from Western hallucinogens.” This in itself, the critic suggests, is enough to expose the lies inherent in the film.

Speaking on the panel at the cinema event on February 15, journalist and critic Abbas Karimi Abbasi agreed that Rosewater was nothing more than propaganda, but he also celebrated the fact that there were forums to discuss the evils of anti-Iranian films like Rosewater. In the past, it was difficult to speak publicly about them, and this had a detrimental effect on society.

US Weakness, Double Standards, Zionist Plots

“Making Rosewater is a sign of America’s weakness and inferiority,” said Rasoul Shademani in his introductory speech to the panel on February 15.

“Zionists are behind every anti-Iranian movie ever made,” critic and filmmaker Shafi Agha Mohammadian offered. Pointing to Roger Hanin, the French actor who starred in the drama series Navarro, he said, “When I was following his death [in February 2015] in French media I ran across praise for him by the grand rabbi of Paris. The only memorial for him took place in a Jewish temple in Paris. Only after his death have we discovered the secret that he was a Zionist.”

Mohammadian said the US agenda was clear. “America wants to imply that Iran can never be put right,” he said, adding that nothing had changed in decades – the US criticizes no matter what Iran does.

Mohammadian also dismissed the film’s torture scenes, and reminded his cinema-loving audience of the West’s poor track record when it came to its treatment of prisoners. “They have no moral standards,” he said, “yet in their movies they pretend it is the other way around.”

“They know that family is very important for us,” said Mohammad Reza Sharafoddin, a movie producer and the head of the Revolution and the Sacred Defense Film Society (Reyavat). “This is why they attack the family by flooding us with movies and series on the Farsi 1 network [an entertainment channel based in Dubai, UAE]. “Unfortunately,” he said, “in these movies we see things such as relations between a man and his wife’s friends or spouses committing adultery,” asking the audience whether they thought some of the entries in this year’s Fajr Film Festival might be inspired by films of this kind.

Fantasy Worlds and an Absent Audience

“I am surprised that Stewart didn’t follow the example of successful political movies in Hollywood,” said journalist and critic Abbasi at the film event. As a political narrative, he said Rosewater lacked the flair of a good drama. “Why does Hollywood give its anti-Iranian movies to first-time directors?” The answer, he said, was that Rosewater was not for a global audience. “Such films are made to be shown in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Tunisia, and are screened for free. In America, cinema is first an industry and then an art. When Hollywood makes a movie for global audiences it makes huge investments and uses special effects — but movies like Rosewater and Camp X-Ray have low budgets because they have no audience.”

Abbasi said the film had no structure, dismissing it as a “docudrama.” Writing in Vatan Emrooz, Esmaeil-Doost took further issue with the film’s structure, saying that Jon Stewart had “tried to satisfy the demands of the Hollywood factory owners by merging the melodramatic story with documentary clips.” But, he said, the story lacks direction, the characters are undeveloped and “there is a lack of cohesive structure.” Stewart, he wrote is “ amateurish,” but admitted that people did want to watch the film because of its star, Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays Maziar Bahari. Yet the film lets down an actor that Esmaeil-Doost normally respects. “At its first official screening in Toronto it couldn’t even attract the attention of those who were looking forward to a conspiracy against Iran. Its cinematic structure was so unorganized and it was so empty of meaning that all plans for presenting another Argo to the Oscars came to naught.”

Esmaeil-Doost wrote that Stewart tries hard to “compensate for the shortcomings of the location,” with clever camera angles. “The locations in Jordan don’t resemble the originals. The music used during demonstration scenes are based on Arabic themes. The scene about the destruction of satellites on the roof doesn’t fit the narrative,” the review said.

At the panel discussion, producer Agha Mohammadian said the fact that the film is shot in a Middle Eastern country was yet another attempt to boost a political agenda. US filmmakers have the budget to make a film like Rosewater in the States, he said; by choosing to film in the Middle East, it was sending a clear message.

“In Islamic countries there are no controls to prevent making movies against another Muslim country,” he said. “If there was unity among Muslim countries they would have never permitted such movies to be made, in the same way that European countries do not allow the production of a movie against European interests.”

“In movies [like Camp X-Ray and Rosewater], they have tried to portray Iranians like Arabs,” complained fellow panelist Abbasi. “The costumes are like those of Arabs and, since in most Hollywood movies Arabs are portrayed as terrorists, this is the way they want to portray Iranians too.”

In his article, Esmaeil-Doost conceded that the film did have “a touch of realism” due to footage from demonstrations and scenes shot with a moving camera. But the film failed because of its “explicit references to the dictatorial behavior of the president and the depiction of the election.” For the critic, none of this is credible.

“We see Bahari go to the outskirts of the city, asking out-of-work youths questions. They all present themselves as supporters of the Green Movement and sarcastically talk about the government cash subsidies as a source of acquiring drugs.”

Fear is to Blame

The US is trying “to prevent our progress with all its might,” producer Sharafoddin said at the cinema discussion, referring to nuclear negotiations. Anti-Iranian films fail to give a true account of life in Iran, yet they use Iranians to help deliver these lies – “stealing our assets,” he said, commenting on the film’s Iranian actors.

Event moderator Rasoul Shademan said Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays Bahari’s mother in the film, “has a contract to act in anti-Iranian movies and she is just fulfilling her obligations. And now Golshifteh Farahani has joined her.”

At the same time, Western film critics have no expertise. “Their idea of Iranian cinema is intellectual movies like Taxi by Jafar Panahi [winner of the 2015 Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award], low-budget movies that one person films on his cell phone,” Abbasi told the audience.

During the event, Shademani called on Iranian directors — particularly those just starting their careers — to honor Iran and avoid defaming Iranian society “under the banner of intellectual films.” They should never, he said, engage in this sort of “injustice to the people of this country.”

In his review, Esmaeil-Doost concluded that Rosewater fails to have political impetus. There is “no creative foundation,” he wrote, “no unifying core.” He reminded his readers why: “Behind the scenes, the makers of the movie consist of political junkies. Odd Lot Entertainment, the company that produced Rosewater, belongs to the wealthy and influential Pritzker family, who were Obama’s fundraisers during the elections. Scott Rudin, an influential Jewish producer, was involved.”

But, he said, the main point is that the West is afraid. It is “anxious about the power of Iran in today’s world and the influence of Islam in the four corners of the world,” so it recruits “Hollywood hegemonists to make feeble-minded distortions of the truth. In their heart of hearts, they know that the steadfast land of Iran will continue to shine with a godly light in the world. Not this borrowed rosewater, nor a series of foul-smelling perfumes by Western bosses, will succeed in overwhelming the true smell of the spring of the Islamic Revolution for lovers of justice.”