The everyday heroines of Iran

Iranian director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad etches indelible portraits of strong, quietly resilient, loving women -- sort of Middle Eastern versions of John Steinbeck’s steadfast Ma Joad.

They are memorable in part because she strives for authenticity and naturalism, and though she’s far more cosmopolitan than the characters in her features and documentaries, there’s more than a bit of Bani-Etemad in all of them.

“I think part of her women characters bear some of her own personality,” says Cheng-Sim Lim, UCLA Film & Television Archive’s head of programming, who curates the institution’s annual Iranian film festival. “She has incredible strength. It is a quiet strength.”

That strength has helped to make Bani-Etemad, 48, Iran’s leading female director. She has occasionally been blocked by the country’s conservative censors but has found ways to express her feelings about social issues.

“Censorship in Iran has no real rules,” Bani-Etemad explains. “It seems to depend a great deal on the tastes of those who happen at that time to be in the position in the Ministry of Culture to grant the permission to make a film. In general, I always find a way of articulating what I want to say.”

Filmmaking is a family affair for the mother of two and grandmother of one. Her husband, Jahangir Kowsair, is frequently her producer. Her 17-year-old daughter, Baran Kowsair, has appeared in all her films.

Relaxing on a recent afternoon in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, Bani-Etemad is warm and friendly, displaying a keen sense of humor and a knowing smile. She understands some English, but she relies on a translator during the interview. Her husband sits at a table nearby and lets his wife do all the talking. Every so often, he’ll hand her a note, just in case she forgets to mention something about the production of her most successful film, “Under the Skin of the City,” which opened Friday in Los Angeles.

Selected by Iranian film critics as the best film of 2001 and the country’s biggest box office success that year, “Under the Skin of the City” is an uncompromising, unblinking semidocumen- tary-style drama revolving around Tuba, a mother of four children, whose ineffectual husband is unemployed due to an injury. Tuba works in a factory to make ends meet and strives to keep her family together.

It isn’t easy. Her eldest daughter is an abused wife, and her oldest son dreams of obtaining a foreign work visa to help make life better for his family. But the son gets into trouble, and Tuba must go to extreme lengths to save his life and the family home.

Bani-Etemad, says Lim, “has a very interesting way of incorporating acute observations, a kind of documentary-like approach combined with domestic melodrama. Her films are not plot-heavy, but she reveals the lives of these women through situations that she presents to you, so you gain this incredible understanding of the details of their lives and what their daily struggles are without being hit over the head with any kind of dogmatic message.”

The director, Lim adds “allows events to unfold. For Americans who have an idea of women in Iran being subservient, oppressed and completely silent, she reveals this whole other world to us. The kind of work she does, you don’t even see a parallel in American cinema.”

It took Bani-Etemad 17 years and four drafts to bring “Under the Skin of the City” to the screen. In each draft, the family’s circumstances were different -- reflecting the economic and political difficulties after the revolution or the Iran-Iraq war or the postwar economy. The script had been turned down three times for a filming permit by the Ministry of Culture.

The characters, Bani-Etemad says, “became so close to me over the years, it was as if they were my neighbors.” Determined to give them a voice, she decided that if the fourth draft wasn’t accepted, she’d publish the screenplay.

It was not so much the admiration for Tuba that compelled her to persevere but her love for Tuba’s class of woman. It is the same class she profiled in her acclaimed dramas “Nargess” (1992) and “The Blue-Veiled” (1995).

“There are a class of women in Iran who are very hard-working, very hardy and who always seem to miss out on one stage of life,” says the director. “Without having lived a childhood, they enter adolescence and then go to work and without being given an adolescence, they become adults. There is a great deal of economic pressure on them, but they always try to serve the family.”

Before filming began, she had her cast spend two months rehearsing. “I wanted more than anything else to make the actors believe the reality of the characters they were depicting rather than just playing the role,” she explains. “They spent time in the location of the family house as a family using the implements and props so it became a reality. My intent was creating a family where everything seemed natural and as far from artifice as possible and as close to the documentary as possible. I had spent so long with these characters they weren’t even part of my imagination.”

The real-life Tubas, she reports, turned out in droves to see the film. “But also, so did many who are part of the progressive and educated. They identified with Tuba and didn’t feel that her problems were alien to them, so there was an across-the-board identification with her. It was also selected as the best film by the students of Iran, who are the educated class.”

“Under the Skin of the City” is the first Bani-Etemad film to receive a national release in the U.S., and she hopes it will give viewers here insight into everyday Iranians and their culture.

“I think American audiences have an affinity for subjects that are filled with humanism and deal with universal human issues,” she says. “It’s a film that I am certain will communicate the same sentiment spectators felt in Iran and which I felt behind the camera.”