Daring film-maker

Iranian director Jafar Panahi started his film career as a television film maker. His directorial debut 'The White Balloon' won the famous Camera d'Or at the Cannes. In an interview with GOWRI RAMNARAYAN, he speaks with passion of his most recent film 'Dayereh', which deals with gender discrimination in Iran's patriarchal society.

SCREAMS of childbirth accompany the roll of credit titles. An aperture opens on the wall in a hospital ward to announce the birth of a girl. "But the ultrasound declared it would be a boy!" cries the maternal grandmother. Would her daughter be divorced for failing to produce a male child?

No,this familiar scene is set not in India as it well could have been, but in Iran, where young mother Solmaz Gholami becomes the archetypal victim of gender bias in patriarchal societies from the dawn of time, which continues to exist in most parts of the modern world, differing only in degree. Though named only at the start and finish, Solamaz haunts you all the more as an unseen presence on the visual medium, imaging those undergoing the same fate, but not always or entirely without hope of deliverance through individual protest and rebellion.

Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi, winner of the Golden Lion for the Best Film at the 57th International Film Festival Venice (September 2000) for his "Dayereh" (The Circle/Farsi/91 mins), has shown extraordinary courage in making a film of this kind, stark, hard, unflinching, with a gruff empathy for the eight women he follows through a day and night in their wanderings through the city. Pari, Arezou, Nargess, Solmaz, Elham, Monir, Nayereh, Mojgan - their names spell uplifting, lyrical beauty meaning Angel, Hope, Flower, Eternal... (Intriguing to note that many of the actors have the same first names as the characters. Another kind of chilling realism?)

The common thread? The women have been released (or have escaped) from prison, only to be spurned by their families. Their crimes are unspecified. Perhaps they are not crimes at all but transgressions of chauvinistic rules by spirited women of different age groups. "From the artistic point of view it is not necessary to know just why these women were put behind bars. That's another film that I don't wish to make," says Panahi. "What's important is that they have left a smaller prison to enter a larger prison, and to analyse their condition there. A problem which seems to have no solutions."

The film is full of paradoxes. It fits an episodic grid within a circular movement. Its strong, singular tone is built up by many distinct voices. "This form grew out of my need to say what I had to say, to hold the content. I wanted a whole made up of distinct, integrated parts. I hit upon it by thinking of a relay race. These women were doing just that, one taking up where the other left off. To succeed, all must succeed. If one slackens, they all lose the race," said Panahi, in his interview to The Hindu, after the screening of "Dayereh", before he could know that the film was going to sweep up six awards at the festival, including the Fipresci Prize from an international jury of film critics, and the Unicef Award. Though his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, and his speech reduced to flatness in the translator's struggle to maintain accuracy, Panahi's hands and voice revealed the passion which fired him to make so daring a film.

The story is seemingly simple. From the fear aroused by the unwanted, newborn girl child, we move to two young women released from prison, rushing through the streets, subjected to male heckling, irked by not being able to smoke in public. Sweet, naive Nargess, who retains her ideals, dreams of love and marriage, wants to return to Rezilique, her childhood paradise. An idyllic painting in the bazaar leads to more fantasies. (Later she buys a shirt for her "fiance" who may not exist except in her rosy mind). The older, protective Arezou finds the money for the fare through questionable means but refuses to accompany her on the journey of disillusionment. Without an ID card or a male escort, Nargess has to lie through her teeth to get a bus ticket to leave the city.

Unmarried Pari has escaped from prison desperate for abortion. But she is kicked out of her home by brothers, and deserted by friend Elham who dare not bring Pari to her Pakistani husband's notice lest he discover her questionable past. Elham's security in job and marriage depends on the concealment of her prison record. That is why she has not visited her in-laws in Lahore. A visa application would pull her bluff. (Ironically, she is the only woman to appear in white; her "purity" has been bought with nail-biting deception.)

Pari encounters a released prison mate in Monir, who now lives with a husband and his wife "Number Two", to whom her own daughter has become more attached. Nayereh is another unfortunate who tries to abandon her little girl on the streets in the hope that the child may find a better life in a more secure and affluent home. In a state of acute distress, she accepts a lift from an unknown male driver, an act that cannot but land her in further trouble. Sharp-tongued Mojgan battles for survival in a world where hypocrisy and corruption assume self-righteousness in condemning her open prostitution.

In this collective feminine world, "all the women make up a single character at different stages of time, and phases of development," explains Panahi. "We follow Nargess (the youngest) in search of her own utopia with a hand held camera and open lens in day light. But step by step, when we reach the end of the film, we see older characters through darker spaces and the lenses closed much more."

Each character trails the one who comes after, in fact she becomes the next character in a progression of experience. The prison connection implies radical significations. "As you can see, all these characters are trying to flout the law, not to follow what is generally accepted," says Panahi. "Ninety per cent of my characters in this film have not accepted what is going on around them. Only the prostitute in the last sequence is more relaxed than the others because she has accepted the social condition in which she finds herself." Every woman lives with fear, but the unsentimental camera also shows how they refuse to let it stifle their fight.

A film like "Dayereh" cannot be seen from an aesthetic point of view alone. That such a film has been made at all, and by a male director, is a sign of hope. It depicts a totalitarian system of summary executions which nevertheless cannot suppress the evils of crime and prostitution, or unrest individual and political. The constant surveillance on the street which the film reflects with mounting tension, is a daunting off-screen factor as well. The director did talk about the need to be acute and clever in making the best of things and securing co-operation for the outdoor location shooting. The screenplay was passed by the State censoring commission, got some State funding, and a co-producer in Italy.

No, it has not been screened in Iran yet. In fact the government's green signal for entering it in the competition section at the Venice film festival came just three days before the stipulated date. "But now I don't want to talk about the difficulties in making this film," Panahi announces firmly, adding that his is not the first film to denounce the social climate in his country, but perhaps the others were "not aesthetic enough in their protests to be chosen by foreign festivals".

At the open press meet, Panahi had said that his task was not to find solutions to social problems but "to recount what he saw clearly and genuinely," to enquire into the causes of distress, to be honest in his transmission.

"I don't see life as a prisonhouse for women," he replied when I asked him about the image of the tiny window which opens and closes at the beginning (you are outside in the hospital ward and hear the announcement of birth), and end (you are inside the cell with mute women as the male guard shuts the window on them). "But I believe that human beings are confined within circles everywhere, the only difference lies in the size of the circumference. History testifies to their existence at all times. I also believe that geography impacts on these circles. For instance, Iran is hemmed in by countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's closed society is partly the result of such geographical features."

What about religion? "In my country, religion is intermingled with politics and this influences all aspects of life, even in details. You see this in my characters. History also shows that whenever religion has gone the wrong way, it has had some very negative impact. But I don't want to talk about such matters."

Panahi did talk about the sparks which flamed into "Dayereh". The immediate stimulus came from a bland press report about a woman who committed suicide after killing her two daughters, without disclosing the reasons for the desperate act. "My wife delivered our second child in the afternoon even as I was presenting my dissertation at the university. I rushed to the hospital. I had a son by then and thought my family was now complete with the new born girl child, but my mother was very upset. Her reaction has stayed with me for 12 years. It has gone into the film."

The film maker hopes that the overwhelming response from an international audience and media in Venice will have its positive impact on Iranian film making in general, and on the response to "Dayereh" in his own country. The first light note came when he added, "The best thing of course would be for the political developments in Iran to make my film obsolete. I hope it it gets outdated very soon!"

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