First-time filmmaker Sanaz Azari was just awarded the Grand Prix du Public at the 2010 Festival International de Cinema de Nyon for her documentary Salaam Isfahan. Conceived as a personal investigation into Sanaz’s own relationship with Iran, where she was born, Salaam Isfahan was shot, coincidentally, during the fraught Iranian elections of 2009. As the movie progresses, the events surrounding the election inevitably creep in, and a secondary story emerges. Sanaz took a few minutes to tell us about the movie she set out to make, the movie she ended up making, and the movie she’s planning to make next.
Base: What is your relationship with Iran and what is your professional and artistic background?
Sanaz Azari: I was born in 1981 in Isfahan, the third largest city in Iran and former capital of Persia. Following the turmoil of the Islamic revolution of ’79 and the first Iran/Iraq war that erupted in 1980, my parents fled the country with me when I was four. Following a passage through Turkey we settled in Brussels, where I’ve lived since. Today, my parents and brother, my entire family is back in Iran.
As for my artistic background, I’ve always been sensitive to poetry. I began writing as a young child. In school, I understood only poetry and literature, and later, philosophy. Everything in science and the rational world seemed very abstract to me, while the subjective, the world of the ideas, actually appeared more logical to me because it’s based on constant questioning. I have therefore had a very difficult learning path, with detours and failures, so perhaps it’s become an “artistic” background. I finished my secondary studies in photography at Inraci, and next studied scenography at La Cambre. In parallel, I studied theater for three years, the Stanislavsky method. It was then that I discovered the work of scenographer Frédérique Leconte (Theater and Reconciliation), an encounter that completely transformed me. To get inside the mechanisms of his work I acted in his troupe with amateur actors. Next I worked as scenographer and on projects of installation, writing, photography, until this first documentary film.
B: What is the origin of this project?
SA: The first time I returned to Iran I was 14 or 15. I had a camera and a notebook. I rediscovered my country, my native land, while photographing it and writing about this profound experience in my notebook. You could say that Salaam Isfahan in this way was already beginning to take form then. With each subsequent return to Iran, I continued photographing these reunions. I think that was my personal way of reclaiming this land, which was mine and at the same time no longer was mine at all. I believe that to make pictures is to take things for yourself; there is something of very egotistical and something very divine in this act. Photographing Iran was a tentative appropriation, that Iran would become “my Iran.”
One day, while walking in a mosque, two young girls, seeing that I was a tourist, came to ask me to photograph them. Putting my eye to the viewfinder, I wondered, “what desire pushes them to want to be part of the picture?” And I think, considering this photo, that they just wanted to travel somewhere else. Salaam Isfahan is therefore the fruit of this feeling that through the picture there is something approximating desire that flows, almost in silence.
B: Being self-taught, what is your relationship with film—documentary, fiction, plastic arts…?
SA: I understand that you say “self-taught” because I never studied film, and have nevertheless just made one. But what if you imagine that this film is not a film at all? Imagine that it began as a writing, and that this writing results in a photographic component, that this photographic component enables me to stop time, space and people, and that this pause can then take the form of a documentary film… On the other hand, it is true that the fact that I did not study film has brought me a very unique approach. For example, my shooting set-up—this is an influence of theater: I set up the movie camera and I am in front of a scene where the people enter the field from either side of the frame. Using sequence shots and long takes creates a relationship with time that is more theatrical than cinematographic. In fact, to admit it, I think it was in the editing of the film that I discovered what it is “to make a movie.” Because it’s at that exact moment that the subject becomes film, and that this film can last a minute or it can last six hours…
I discovered cinema late, in adolescence, and only at home, not in classrooms. It’s then that I soaked up everything by Almodovar and everything by Lynch, and later, Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and Godard. My relationship with film is very familiar, very warm; when I like a movie, I have the feeling that I’ve found a home. The movie theater reassures me of my troubles. It’s warm and comforting there. And the feeling of the room, to be warm with other people. It’s a very unique experience, to find yourself in a room, crying next to strangers in front of the screen. It’s a strange phenomenon. Regarding the difference between documentary and fiction, I do not consider that to be important. I believe that in both cases we can tell a story while sharing our perspectives on the things of this world. Said Kiarostami, “That it’s a question of documentary or fiction, it’s all a huge lie to arrive at a bigger truth.” I agree completely!
B: Can you talk about the link between photography and cinema in your film, and the relevance of this dialog between subject, photography, and cameraman in Iran?
SA: The camera gave me an excuse to stop people in the street, to have them pose; it was a way to stop time. And while the camera stopped time, the movie, by contrast, extended it. It is precisely in this relationship with time that photography and the movie become whole in Salaam Isfahan. The camera allowed me to tame the “ferocious beast” that is Iran, not head-on, but from the side. Iranian culture, in contrast to the Western culture, says things in an indirect way. There always are two readings to what is said. It is almost an encoded language, leaving out even all the formal nuances of social etiquette… The powerlessness of a dictatorship lies in the fact that it does not prevent freedom of thought, and that censored people will always say what they want to say, they will just say it in another way. The movie is a reflection of this indirect speech.
I remember a discussion with a woman in the street, close to the “guardians of the revolution,” and she complained about the drought of the river due to the fact that she felt stifled and that everyone was sick… Was she really speaking of drought? Or could it have been the political climate, where every day journalists were forced to leave the country, and young people were losing their lives in demonstrations? And the film directors themselves, did they stop…? In a totalitarian regime, the metaphor is your biggest ally, and if you know to use it you are a free man. It is for that reason that poetry has always played a vital role in Iran.
B: How was the shooting process? And how does this very personal project fit within such an historic political context?
SA: Before getting to the point of shooting, which I’d waited so long for, I went through every other phase—writing, seeking financial backing, putting together the team. That whole process took about two years. In writing the film, I had specified that any political dimension that would arise would have to happen within the context of the film, and not the opposite. I learned of the elections a month before leaving. While going alone to scout locations, a months before shooting, I had this information in the back of my mind. But as soon as I arrived again to shoot, it was immediately apparent that this election was going to be historic. Despite having secured a filming authorization, shooting was done under very difficult conditions. But that also turned out to be an advantage: We had to get right to the heart of things, simply because we didn’t have much time. This restriction pushed us to do more with less. Every moment of shooting with the team was very intense and without conversation. We went straight for the goal and everything flowed. I believe this was due to the intensity of the larger situation. We didn’t have time to ask ourselves questions. Fortunately, everything on our side had been very well prepared. My bigger challenge as director during shooting was to remain faithful to the script, which was suddenly subject to the very particular context of the elections of June 2009. The risk was that I fall, siezed with emotion, in the upset and the sensationalism of the events. I tried as long as possible to fit this historic moment into the script I had written. I attempted, without control, to relate what I wanted to relate while making the best of the electoral events. What was interesting was that my medium was very different from the one that Iranians were using—the mobile telephone. While they filmed their own history with cell phones from the inside, within the turmoil, I filmed with a professional tool, stepping back and with an agenda. I think that this is what makes Salaam Isfahan interesting for the general public: It gives an opportunity for people to see what they’ve already seen, on the news and internet, but from another angle.
B: What was the collaboration with Base and how did it come about?
SA: The collaboration with Base brought the film a coherent visual anchor, strong and contemporary. Thanks to the titles, created by BaseMotion, the film gained in weight and impact. These titles, created by Base’s Arno Baudin and Jean-Marc Joseph, are a clever and very appropriate reflection of the political content of the film. This black mask that shows and hides at the same time. To show and not to show, this is also the language of the movie, with this game of in the field and out of the field.
B: Future projects?
SA: I’m currently working on a fictitious screenplay that has nothing to do with the Iran. It’s a story of a friendship between two homeless men. I am equally busy taking courses in Persian, to learn to read and to write this language that I learned only verbally. These lessons are unbelievably rich because the teacher is very enthusiastic and shares his passion for Iran in every letter of alphabet. It’s a documentary project that reveals itself bit by bit. A way to continue to film Iran without returning there because, in leaving the country with the footage for Salaam Isfahan, I said farewell to Isfahan. For as long as the regime doesn’t change, I will not be permitted to return to Iran. As Mr. Satrapi says at the end of Persepolis, liberty has a price.
Loading ...
No comments