Expatriates support Iranian films

At UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, staffers still tell stories about the first Iranian film festival, held there 13 years ago. “Because of the revolution and tensions between the U.S. and Iran, people hadn’t seen any films for a decade,” said programmer David Pendleton.

“There were masses of people trying to bribe box office staff to get into sold-out screenings.” As the organizers quickly learned, “it’s a society that takes cinema very seriously,” he said.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian films have flourished, perhaps surprisingly, under the strict rules of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian films have been acclaimed in Cannes and Berlin and distributed worldwide; more than two dozen films, including the recently released “Under the Skin of the City,” have flowed into U.S. art house theaters over the last three years. The large immigrant community -- especially in Los Angeles -- has gained a reputation as some of the world’s most ardent supporters of their national cinema.

“There’s a tradition of cinephilia in Iranian culture that is above average,” said Wendy Lidell, vice president for theatrical releasing for the New York-based Wellspring, a foreign language film distributor. “I haven’t seen it anywhere else except among Parisians. It’s not just an emigre population,” she noted, “but an emigre population with a strong love of cinema.”

Although New York typically out-grosses Los Angeles for independent and foreign language films, distributors said Iranian films fare better in Los Angeles, known sometimes as “Tehrangeles” for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have settled here since the revolution. What’s more, Iranian films outperform other foreign films in the Los Angeles area, Lidell said, because the local community is willing to support them.

“You can’t underestimate the numbers,” said Dorna Khazeni, a Silver Lake consultant for Persian language films. She believes there are 500,000 Iranians in Southern California, many of them highly educated immigrants gathered in the affluent communities of Encino, Beverly Hills and Irvine. Her estimate is much higher than U.S. census figures, but the community is sizable enough to support at least two radio stations, one cable television station, several newspapers and its own Yellow Pages, with 130,000 entries.

The Iranian community’s undeniable enthusiasm for films from home transcends a mix of religious and political views, Khazeni said. “No matter what, these people miss Iran. They might have a lot of issues with it. Some might say they hate it,” she said. “But still, there’s something about seeing a film with people in Iran, speaking Farsi.”

Part of their devotion to film comes from the homesickness of relatively new immigrants, who tend to be less assimilated than their counterparts on the East Coast, some community leaders said. Some also cite cultural traditions that emphasize artistry, while others point to the quality of Iranian cinema itself, shot in a simple, natural and documentary-like style with philosophical messages woven into compelling melodrama.

Many Iranian immigrants are so familiar with the styles and exploits of Iranian filmmakers that they speak of them as if they were trusted friends. Indeed, Freshteh Amin, a recent immigrant from Tehran, said, “The Iranian community trusts the Iranian filmmakers. They want to go and see what’s really happening in Iran, not what the press says.”

*

Making a day of it

In Los Angeles, the unofficial center of Iranian cinema is the Laemmle Music Hall on Wilshire Boulevard, a modest art house theater with one screen dedicated almost exclusively to Iranian films. The theater is across the street from Beverly Hills Cuisine, a white-tablecloth Persian kosher restaurant.

Groups and families frequently make a day of it, combining the movie with lunch or dinner, said Bob Laemmle, owner of Laemmle Theaters. “You’ll see 15 or 20 people sometimes that obviously all know each other and are coming together,” he said.

Sunday’s matinee showing of “Under the Skin of the City,” director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s tale of a struggling middle-class Tehran family held together by its sick and working mother, attracted Abe Oheb, a real estate investor, his sister and her husband, who had all lunched at the restaurant before seeing the film. Oheb, who left Iran in 1980 and hasn’t returned since, said he sees most of the Iranian films shown there because he’s curious about how people in Iran live now. Two sisters, Noori and Sara Daili, brought their 70-year-old mother, who was visiting from Iran, because they wanted to take her to a film she could understand in her own language.

Like many expatriates, they did not expect simply to be entertained. In fact, they said they had just been discussing some of the social issues explored in the fictional film: the competition for scarce jobs among overeducated Iranians and the changing role of women. Their widowed mother, Gohar Daili, who wore the traditional head scarf and long dress, was surprised that the mother in the film could lead the family and make decisions. The sisters were interested that drugs played a role in the family’s life and were impressed that the director is a woman. They asked their mother if the film had also been shown in Iran and were surprised to learn that censors had allowed a film with such direct observations to be released there.

Partly because of post-revolutionary restrictions, including screening permits and censorship of sexual images, Iranian filmmakers have developed their creativity over the last decades, said Mark Amin, vice chairman of Lions Gate Films and a sponsor of UCLA’s Iranian film events. Many have used children, simple stories and lyrical tones to encode philosophical or political messages. Iranian audiences know how to decode the films, he said. While dealing with censors is a “huge challenge,” many filmmakers are able to get their messages through because censors often miss subtleties. “Censors look for the real obvious things,” Amin said. “People who work as censors are not exactly the brightest people anyway. It’s easy to outsmart them.”

Now, however, most filmmaking is privately funded, he said. Although that has emboldened some filmmakers to confront social inequities in their films, it has also exposed them to new marketplace pressures, UCLA’s Pendleton said. “It will be interesting to see what happens,” he said.

In a cross-section of the expatriate Iranian community, there has been a sense of relief that Iran has been recognized for artwork as opposed to terrorism, Khazeni said. At the same time, many believe those art films were made only for art house and film festival audiences, she said, and do not represent the popular cinema of Iran.

“There is definitely a resentment amongst a wide section of Iranians that Iran is not made up of faraway villages and poor people wandering the fields,” she said. Like most American filmgoers, most Iranians are “not really that interested in slow-moving hour-and-a-half films about death.” Only about 15% of Iran’s 70 films made each year can be categorized as art house films, according to documentarian Jamsheed Akrami.

One savvy entrepreneur has found a niche in releasing popular Iranian movies rarely seen abroad.

Amir Kalantari, a partner in the Iranian Film Society, said his 8-year-old company releases about seven movies a year and is as far as he knows the only importer of commercially popular indigenous foreign films.

It shows films in a dozen U.S. cities as well as Vancouver and Toronto and has an English-language Web site (www.irfilms.com).

Kalantari rents the theaters in which to show his hand-picked films. To spread the word, he promotes them heavily on Iranian television and radio and leaves posters and fliers in Iranian shops and restaurants. Recently, one of his films, “The Pastry Girl,” a popular comedy, played at the Music Hall for seven weeks, followed by a three-week run in Encino. Some films, including “The Time of Drunken Horses,” have found a significant crossover audience at the Music Hall.

Hoping to ride the commercial wave created by the Iranian Film Society, Laemmle said major independents like Sony Classics or Miramax have asked to show their Iranian art house films there.

At UCLA, showing a combination of art house and popular Iranian films has had mixed results, Pendleton said.

Still, the Iranian film festival remains the most regularly held and best attended of the school’s national cinema series. While those in the Iranian community have learned to get their tickets early, a growing audience of non-Iranians who arrive 10 or 15 minutes before show time are usually disappointed to find long lines and no tickets. “Next year,” Pendleton said, “we hope to have online ticketing.”