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Film
A very Kurdish dilemma
The internationally acclaimed Kurdish film maker Bahman Ghobadi talked to Chris Kutschera about life after the award winning movie No One Knows About Persian Cats.
“I am now a traveller with several suitcases”, explained Ghobadi, during a short visit to in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, in June. “I have two suitcases in the United States, where I go to improve my English, one in an apartment in Berlin, where I plan to shoot a film, and one in Erbil, where I have several projects under way.”
Why did he leave Iran? Well, Ghobadi explains, it all happened after the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, where his film No One Knows About Persian Cats, usually referred to under the shortened title Persian Cats, won the Un Certain Regard award and the Special Jury Prize.
A few days after the festival ended, Ghobadi travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan and clandestinely crossed the Iranian border, as did the smugglers of his film A Time for Drunken Horses, released in 2000. But he did not get very far. He was quickly discovered, arrested and sent to prison, spending three days in Hamadan jail and four days in Tehran. Then, just three days before the presidential elections on 12 June 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Ghobadi was free to go. He was turned loose and told firmly: “Go, and do not come back”.
During the intervening year Bahman Ghobadi has been busy promoting his film Persian Cats, the “first Iranian film about music and rock ’n’ roll”, which was shot in only 18 days. One particularly striking scene in the film shows young musicians playing among cows in a barn! “Heavy metal is very noisy,” explains Ghobadi, “the musicians had to go and play outside the city. However, although the authorities were not prepared to accept us, the cows didn’t have a problem.” “Since I began shooting my films, I have never been able to let my guard down”, laments Ghobadi. “After the film Marooned in Iraq (2002), I was called in by the security services and interrogated five times. After Turtles Can Fly (2004), I was questioned again and told that the film was ‘pro-American’!
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