“For me making films was never a job and I will stop making them when I start looking at it as a way of making money”



These were the words of Pouran Derakshandeh at the award ceremony at which she received a life-time achievement award from the Iranian minister of culture and the Islamic leadership on Fatima’s, (Muhamed’s daughter) birthday anniversary. The ritual itself tells us in an idealogical sense that this established director, screenwriter and producer does not belong among politically undesirable authors and that she will never have to smuggle films in bread, as happened to Panahi and Rasoulof. Her films were always shown and distributed in Iran without any problems. However, that does not mean that Derakshandeh simply capitulated in her meeting with the apparatchiks of the Farabi film foundation. For that matter, that same political body gave the green light to Farhadi’s film A Separation to represent Iranian cinema in the Oscar nominations in the category of Best Foreign Film. Perhaps the opus of this author, if we stay within the zone of Iranian “female” film, does not match up with that of Niki Karimi in terms of being potentially controversial. Nevertheless, her subtle probing of Iranian marriages, machismo and the role of women in contemporary Iranian society is not without audacity. For example, while in Marya Keshavarz’s debut (Circumstance), the characters overdub Milk and Sex and the City, Pouran Derakshandeh’s characters like video games and “dirty” movies, go to fitness centers and put posters from The Last Samurai on their walls, even though their love sufferings and tragic romances are very old fashioned, as evidenced by the father’s vintage car, in which the author’s unhappy heroes go on one last trip, is hidden away as a reliquary in the garage, (see: The Wet Dream).

Like Asghar Farhadi, who portrays divorce as not necessarily connected to failed marriages, but rather in a much broader context such as separation of Iranian social classes by economic, cultural and educational factors, Derakshandeh engages in an analysis of class differences. Farhadi’s Nader and his wife Simin, and almost all Derakshandeh’s heroes, belong to the upper class and live in luxurious villas, trapped by their social status, family obligations and financial and moral decisions. Farhadi also depicts failed marriages whose toll is primarily paid by the children, while in Derakshandeh’s film a heterosexual couple’s marriage and romance is in danger because of a third person. In The Lost Time, the harmony of a marriage is disrupted by an adopted child that the husband refuses to accept, and so finally his wife leaves him after ten years of marriage because she has begun to feel like a machine. In The Children of Eternity, a romantic relationship is in danger because of a jealous brother with Down’s syndrome (the author is also obsessed with the mentally handicapped in Endless Dreams). In The Wet Dream, a son leaves his mother and runs away to his father because she has a new lover. In A Love Without Frontier, the marital bliss of an Iranian doctor and an American photojournalist comes under fire after Saddam’s invasion on Iran, so she decides to leave Teheran and return to L.A., where there is another hot war going on – the war between street gangs. “I cannot understand what is happening in America”, the author’s heroine tells herself didactically.

However, where Farhadi leaves behind loose ends and children faced with tough decisions, Derakshandeh always gives her heroes a chance for a new beginning (the only exception is the tragic ending of The Wet Dream). Maybe she has a better understanding of female characters, unlike the excellent Abdolreza Kahani whose film 20 (Bist) she produced (see the author’s repetitive scenes of funeral suppers attended by only grieving men dressed in black). Nevertheless, the scene of a party in The Wet Dream in which one of the heroes dances dressed as a girl, is probably the furthest point which Derakshandeh dares to reach in her questioning of sexual boundaries in an Iranian society dominated by men. Still, no matter how many times Arash’s father tells him that men don’t cry, in Derakshandeh’s films most of the tears fall from men’s eyes. (Dragan Rubeša)