Guilt by Association

Ramin Serry was only 10 years old when he became a target. It was Nov. 4, 1979, and 52 Americans were taken hostage in Iran. Although Serry, born in Chicago, had always thought of himself as an all-American kid, on that cool day in November he first realized he was not like everyone else.

Serry’s parents were Iranian. And for the next 444 days of the hostage crisis, Serry’s life became a living torment.

Out of shame and anger, he refused to talk about his experiences and never showed any interest in his cultural roots. It took 23 years for him to be able to tell his story. Now a 33-year-old director, Serry decided to make a feature film about his experience. The independently distributed “Maryam” opens Friday in Los Angeles.

The film, which opened in New York in late February, is about a young Iranian American girl and her family who become pariahs in their middle-class suburb when the hostage crisis erupts. The experience forces her to get in touch with her cultural roots and try to forge an identity in a hostile world. The film, which stars two relatively unknown actors--Mariam Perris, who is Maryam, and David Ackert, who plays Maryam’s cousin Ali--was also a voyage of self-discovery for the two stars and Serry.

“The most important event in my life was what happened during the hostage crisis,” said Serry, who lives in New York City. “No matter where an Iranian was at that time, it had a profound effect on them.”

The film’s subject is particularly relevant in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the backlash some Arab Americans felt in the wake of the attack. Some assaults on people of Middle Eastern and Asian descent are being investigated as hate crimes. Images in the film from 1979 of Americans waving the flag and chanting “USA” are reminiscent of scenes immediately after the terrorist attack in September. The timing was coincidental, since the film was completed in 1998.

Like many other independent filmmakers, Serry and his girlfriend (also the film’s producer), Shauna Lyon, raised the $1 million for the film using their credit cards and relying on donations from family and friends. Serry says both Ali and Maryam are reflections of himself.

The film was a cathartic experience for Serry, said Lyon, who has been his girlfriend for 12 years. “It has helped him come to terms not only with his own cultural identity but with a lot of different types of people who make up the Iranian American community.”

Serry remembers when his father would shut himself in a bedroom and listen to the BBC world report on the radio--the first harbinger of difficult times to come.

“I remember lying awake and hearing over the radio the toll of Big Ben and the British announcer crackling over the airwaves,” recalled Serry. “I don’t remember being able to make sense of it at the time. But emotionally I felt very unsettled. It was only as a teenager or in college that I was able to process and understand it.”

Serry put those emotions into a story after graduating from Columbia University’s film school in 1995. The film received positive feedback at festivals, but “we were told by the distributors that they didn’t have faith the movie could be marketed,” said Serry. “We don’t have big stars and it deals with politics.”

Like most determined first-time filmmakers, Serry and Lyon persisted. Their big break came when critics Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper gave it a thumbs-up review recently on their syndicated TV show, said Serry. At that point, Serry and Lyon were able to convince exhibitors to give them a chance.

For Greg Laemmle, vice president of L.A.’s Laemmle Theatres, booking the movie was a no-brainer. There are about 700,000 people of Iranian descent in Los Angeles County, according to the Iranian Muslim Assn. of North America, a nonprofit organization based in Culver City. In an average year, the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills shows a dozen Iranian films, Laemmle said, adding that his company has been catering to the Iranian population for at least 15 years. “We are aware of the fact that there is a large Iranian population in Los Angeles and, quality of this film aside--and it is very good--we thought it would appeal to that audience,” said Laemmle.

Many of the Iranian filmgoers are now second generation, the children of the people who lived through the revolution. Although many were born in this country, they still feel an affinity for their parents’ native land, said Iraj Ghasemi, head of N.E.J. International Pictures, an Iranian film distributor in the U.S. “About 10 years ago, the average age of our audience was around 40, now I see many 20-, 30-somethings,” he said. “The new movies that are coming out of Iran are paying more attention to the new generations and the current problems in Iran.”

The election of the more moderate Mohammad Khatami in 1996 also benefited filmmakers, said Ghasemi. With increasing freedom there has been a greater output of internationally acclaimed films that deal with issues ranging from the oppression of women to the persecution of Kurds on the Iran-Iraq border to the destitution of Afghan refugees living in Iran. However, there are still incidents of filmmakers being jailed for their work and the government banning their films, said Ghasemi.

“Maryam” also deals with the internal conflict within the Iranian community between the more secular Iranians who fled the ayatollah and the more conservative or traditional Muslims who abhorred the shah and remain staunch supporters of a conservative Islamic state.

In the film, Maryam’s orphaned cousin from Iran, Ali, comes to the U.S. to study medicine. But Ali is a supporter of the ayatollah and a conservative Muslim who blames the death of his father on the shah’s notorious secret police. His more traditional beliefs--particularly on the role of women and assimilating into American culture--create conflict in Maryam’s family. Ackert says his character, Ali, gives a human face to people the media have labeled “Muslim extremists.”

Strangely enough, Ackert had negative feelings about Islam before he was cast for the part. Ackert’s father is American and his mother Iranian. Both were Christians living in Iran when the revolution happened. They fled Iran and settled in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. Ackert was born in the United States and, like Serry, had only a vague connection to his mother’s homeland. But in his research for the role, he came to appreciate not only Iranian culture but also Islam.

“I had a lot of very negative opinions about what I thought was Islam, and in fact I had a lot of shame about being Iranian,” said the 32-year-old actor. “I had to really embrace those things so I wouldn’t feel I was faking it for this role. I went to mosques, read the Koran and immersed myself in the culture.... Saying that Islam is all about terrorism is like writing off all of Western religion because of the crusades.”

Ackert also had some scarring experiences as a result of the hostage crisis. Ackert had just switched schools when the hostages were taken. Being the new kid in his sixth-grade class, his teacher introduced him as the “new Iranian student who could explain what was going on.”

“I was marked for death from that point on,” he recalled. “Dodge ball became ‘Peg David.’” Like Serry, Ackert was called every expletive and insult and was beat up nearly every day. “I became really terrified of school,” he said.

So he started playing hooky and telling his mom he was ill. He would concoct pains and vomiting spells so serious that his mother finally took him to the hospital. It was there, when he received get-well cards from his classmates that he learned to forgive.

“They said things like, ‘Dear David, I’m sorry for punching you in the face after slamming your finger in the locker’ or ‘Dear David, I’m sorry for beating you up during dodge ball,’ and in my 11-year-old mind I fell in love with my classmates.... I [also] realized I could not run away from what I was,” he said.

Ultimately, the story is “about trying to find the humanity in each other,” said Parris, who was born in Great Britain but whose parents are Azerbaijani. “It’s about establishing your individuality and identity and having it be accepted.”