Banned by Tehran, Barred by London: UK’s Iranian Double Standard
London’s film festival crowned films about empire and exile as Britain refused a visa to an Iranian director Tehran bans, while backing a Persian film for the Oscars.
The BFI London Film Festival gave its best film award on Sunday to Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium, a 175-minute journey across the Soviet Union of the early 1970s, built from footage shot by two Italian film-makers working for the Italian Communist Party’s film archive. The Grierson award for best documentary went to Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land, eight years in the life of an Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family fighting eviction and racism on the edge of Amman. London has crowned two films about people crushed by power, in the same week Britain shut its door on an Iranian director whose films Tehran bans.
The Empty Seat
Mohsen Amiryousefi’s The Banning Curse had its world premiere at the festival on Wednesday. Its director was not in the audience. Britain refused visas to Amiryousefi and his editor, Kamy Saffari, according to his representative. No reason for the refusal has been made public.
The film is a satire about being banned. When his first feature, Bitter Dream, won a special mention for the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, Amiryousefi returned to Iran to find the authorities had banned it, and the censors have dogged him ever since. He shot the new film indoors, without permits, playing himself opposite the Angel of Death. Asked whether he fears prison, the fate of his colleague Mohammad Rasoulof, the 54-year-old joked: “When I was young, I was much more fearless. Now that my hair is turning gray, I am somehow more conservative.”
Four years ago it was Tehran that kept an Iranian director out of London. In October 2022 the Iranian authorities confiscated Mani Haghighi’s passport and stopped him boarding his flight to present Subtraction at the festival, and the BFI spoke up for him. This year the barrier stood in London. The festival screened a film about censorship with its director censored out of the room.
Britain’s Persian Weapon
The timing could hardly be more awkward. This month a BAFTA committee chose Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution, a Persian-language documentary about four decades of repression in Iran, as Britain’s entry for the international feature Oscar, in a year when British jets were shooting down Iranian drones. Ahangarani was locked up in Evin prison in 2011 and has lived in exile in London since 2023. Britain has taken an Iranian dissident’s film and pointed it at Tehran.
So the UK will parade one Iranian dissident in Hollywood while it keeps another out of the country. The arithmetic is cold. A dissident in exile is a useful voice against a hostile government. A dissident who still lives in Iran, and needs a visa, is a risk on a Home Office form.
Awards are won in the room. In 2017 Asghar Farhadi charmed Golden Globe voters at a dinner in an exclusive Beverly Hills restaurant for The Salesman, then refused to attend the Oscars after Donald Trump’s travel ban, and Hollywood rallied to his side. Ahangarani can work every reception in London and Los Angeles this winter. Amiryousefi could not even sit in the cinema where his own film premiered.
Empires on Screen
A jury led by the American documentary maker Sam Pollard called Imperium “an extraordinary film that explores the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s from a rich archive”. One critic found the Soviet effort on screen to fold dozens of peoples into one Leninist nation “arbitrary, forced, and even colonialist”. Loznitsa knows all about loyalty tests. In March 2022, weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled him after his films were shown at a Russian film festival in Nantes. He had spoken out against a blanket boycott of Russian cinema.
London has a taste for films about Moscow’s reach. In 2014 its top prize went to the Russian drama Leviathan, while Ukraine’s The Tribe took the first feature award and the Syrian documentary Silvered Water won the Grierson. This year’s winners, from Loznitsa’s Soviet republics to Bkerat’s family on the margins of Jordan, are portraits of people living under someone else’s rules.
The festival adores films about artists silenced by states, and this year a British visa officer staged a live demonstration. A Persian film about a lifetime of bans had its premiere in London to an empty director’s seat, while Britain carries another Persian film to Hollywood as a banner of free expression.
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