This episode explores the multiple contradictions of Iranian society today. What are the limits for Iranian cultural producers? And what tactics do they employ to circumvent censorship and social taboos? Tune in for the wide-ranging conversation with insights from cinema and culture to women's protests and demographic concerns.
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GLOSSARY
Woman, Life, Freedom (p. 2 in the transcript, 08:00)
Woman, Life, Freedom is a protest slogan that affirms that the rights of women are at the center of life and liberty. The slogan is best known in English-language media for its use within the context of Iran. In September 2022 protesters in Iran and abroad adopted the slogan after Jina Mahsa Amini an Iranian woman in her early 20s, died unexpectedly on September 16, 2022, while in custody of Iran’s Gasht-e Ershad (Guidance Patrol; also called “morality police”) for “improper” clothing. The death of Amini, a 22-year-old Sunni woman from Iran’s minority Kurdish community, was a reflection of the escalating and unrelenting authoritarianism of the Iranian regime at a time of deepening economic instability. While the circumstances surrounding Amini’s death made the slogan resonate throughout Iran and the world, it already had been in wide use among Kurdish activists. The incident sparked outrage in Iran, where anger toward the government had already been flaring, and ignited a sustained and widespread protest movement. The protests over Amini’s death, which reflected a broad and far-reaching set of grievances caused by persistent government negligence, found expression in the slogan. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, the Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
In today's episode of Democracy in Question, I'm really pleased to welcome Professor Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Personal Chair of Cinema and Iran at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Nacim is a governor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and also at the Institute of Ismaili Studies.
Her work focuses on cinema and visual culture in the Middle East, particularly Iran. Her current research projects investigate the constructions of masculinities in Iranian cinema, as well as religious epics and their representation in films. She's a National Committee member of the Aga Khan Foundation[i] and a board member of the Academic Council of the Iran Heritage Foundation[ii]. She has curated and been a speaker and a jury member at film festivals in Edinburgh and abroad. Somewhat unusually, we begin our conversation today with a seemingly nonpolitical topic, Iranian cinema. As we'll discover, however, Iranian cinema is deeply embedded in a web of thoroughly politicized institutions and agencies, making it a fascinating topic to explore in its relationship to state power.
This context renders even the most innocuous artistic gesture susceptible to censorship and could potentially result in persecution of filmmakers. Nacim is an expert on contemporary Iranian cinema and its reception both at home and abroad. She's thus uniquely positioned to comment on these invisible but powerful background conditions that Iranian film directors have to negotiate.
We'll talk about the constraints and opportunities of filmmaking in this particular political and cultural context, but also about the effects of religiously codified gender restrictions and hierarchies, some of them quite surprising. I will ask Nacim to discuss the aftermath of the women's mass protests since 2022 in Iran. What alternative strategies of forging solidarity networks and mobilizing against repressive crackdowns by authorities have been worked out by now? And we'll conclude our conversation by highlighting some of the curious contradictions at the heart of Iran's theocratic, patriarchal, conservative regime, contradictions that have to do with women's excellent access to mass education, the religious framing of modern societal problems such as fertility or marriage law, and the growing tensions between the strictures of everyday life governed by religion and an increasingly urban, secular citizenry. Nacim, welcome to the podcast, and it's a real pleasure to have you as my guest today. Thanks so much for joining me from Edinburgh.
Nacim Pak-Shiraz (NP): Thank you very much, uh, Shalini, it's a pleasure to be here with you. I'm delighted.
SR: So let's start by talking about Iranian cinema before we come to politics and movements for democracy. Every cinephile around the world is probably familiar with the exquisite films of Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi. But what many are less familiar with is the socio-political context in which these Iranian filmmakers operate. Directors and actors perceived to pose a threat to the regime are under surveillance, often persecuted. Jafar Panahi, for instance, was recently imprisoned and a ban was imposed on him by the authorities.
This constraining institutional matrix includes pre- and post-production censorship by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance that targets the representation of religion, of political issues, of gender sensitive themes. And considering the strict confines in which filmmakers have had to operate for decades, the rich output of Iranian cinema is truly amazing. In your work, you focused on how Iranian filmmakers are able to explore and circumvent the limits of what's possible. So, could you talk about the subtle techniques that filmmakers must use to navigate this complex web of censorship and surveillance? And what are the narrative visual choices that they have made which allow them to retain their artistic integrity as sensitive chroniclers of their political reality?
NP: As you mentioned, the production of culture in Iran is very much monitored by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, but really, as many other aspects of Iranian societies, it is a constant process of negotiation, negotiation and finding ways of trying to circumvent them. Now, the ministry imposes both pre- screening and pre-, even, filming approval processes.
And filmmakers have found different ways of navigating that. We can talk about how they use metaphorical references to talk about things that are considered to be taboo, how they use their camera angle, how they use children instead of adults to talk about really adult issues. But what they also do is that they sometimesoffer a different script to the Ministry of Guidance, get the approval for that, and then change it and make another film.
And when it’s time for screening it, they sometimes used to getaway with screening it during the film festival within Iran. And then either it would be completely banned, or they had to remove certain aspects of the film, so they had to censor it. So, they're constantly negotiating it.
Then you have filmmakers like Bahman Ghobadi, who made the film “No One Knows about Persian Cats”, without any permit. So, what he did was, he, filmed it in 17 days, and the cameraman hid in the car boot when they were filming the scenes and shots on the streets, just to do it covertly.
But I think now it's gotten to a point where filmmakers are refusing to do any of this. So, we have filmmakers who come up with a film like“My Favorite Cake”, where the film breaks all kinds of taboos. It talks about not just extramarital sex, but also something that has not really been discussed beforeamongst people of a certain age.
So, the characters are over 70. They're depicting women without the veil inside their homes. So, a realistic depiction of people's lives. They're showing these characters drinking. They're showing these characters who are not related to each other dancing. So, I think if you look at the art of what's happening in Iranian cinema, initially it starts with metaphors. Initially it starts with trying ways of circumventing it. And now it's gotten to a point where they're like, enough is enough. And I think a large part of it has to do with the 2022 women, life freedom movement within Iran.
SR: We'll come back to the movement in a moment, but the question for me is, does the regime regard cinema as a special source of threat to its ideological hegemony over Iranian society, or does music, pop music or theater suffer the same fate?
NP: A lot of the cultural productions, including literature, theater, music, are monitored very closely. So, in fact, the film I talked about, “No One Knows about Persian Cats”, is about underground music. And the kind ofnot just in terms ofrap or hip hop, but the lyrics that are used. But cinema, because of its access, the widely accessed form and also the fact that it can reach a lot of people of various backgrounds and ages is considered to be really potent, because right from the first day of the revolution when Khomeini returned to Iran after his exile, he talked about the importance of cinema, and he highlighted cinema as an educational tool. And on the one hand, cinema got the approval to be something that is permitted within the Islamic Republic, and on the other hand, it's something to be used to educate people. Therefore, it's considered to be something really potent.
And they have been trying very hard to create this. Islamic cinema right from the outset of the Islamic Republic, and they've tried through different avenues. I argue that it hasn't succeeded in kind of creating this Islamic cinema that they wanted to create, they have now opted for Islamic themes, which is possible, but how can you have an Islamic cinema?
SR: So, you've addressed in your work also how Iranian cinema taps both into national cultural identity and its very many different rich traditions, while at the same time it uses forms and artistic expression that speak to audiences around the world. So, you're equally familiar with cinema inIran itself, but also the work of Iranian filmmakers living abroad. So, could you talk about the differences in Iranianfilms made in exile, so to speak, and the difference in reception of Iranian cinema, both at home and abroad?
NP: If I were to say very briefly, Iranian cinema made within Iran has always been more successful than the films made by the diaspora outside. Now, one of the things that Jafar Panahi has always said is that: “I will not leave Iran because what nourishes me to create this kind of film is the soil. I'm like a tree that's rooted into the soil. Once you uproot me, I'm no longer able to bear fruit.” I'm obviously paraphrasing him. This is not to say that the films that have been made outside Iran by the Iranian diaspora are not worthy of attention. Of course they are, and there is a very wide range of films that have been made.
But in terms of even their popularity amongst Iranians, it's still the Iranian films that speak to an Iranian audience. You have films like “The Stoning of Soraya M”, for example, made outside, which talks about the concerns that, you know, people have about the practice of stoning.It is a bit of a problematic film in the way that it's very black and white, it doesn't have the nuances that you can see within Iranian cinema itself.
But in terms of reception, what I have noticed, sitting amongst audiences, both in the West and within Iran, is that the Iranian diaspora has this anxiety about the representation of Iran outside. They are really concerned about the films showing Iran as a backward place, as a rural place, because the films are about rural areas, especially with the films, earlier films of Kiarostami.
And that it's showing, what they call “siah namayi”, or a blackened image of the country. So, they have those anxieties. They want Iran to be depicted as somewhere which is quite progressive, to reflect its rich cultural heritage, to not fall within this whole Western stereotype of the ideas of Iran.
So, they have those anxieties. On the other hand, the Iranians within Iran, for a very long time, the filmmakers, I think, were really impacted by international film festival tastes because international film festivals would kind of incline towards more exotic images of those places. And this inadvertently created the cycle of art house cinema coming out of Iran for a while that focused on the more exotic aspects of Iran, up until, I would argue, Asghar Farhadi, because his success with the Oscars and with a film that focused actually on middle class Iranians, then created a new trend amongst younger filmmakers within Iran.
So you can see how Iran's cinema production is connected both to the international film festivals outside as well as the interaction with the Diaspora, even though they, they don't really take on board any of the Diaspora'sreactions really seriously, because when the filmmakers come, these Diaspora members stand up and really question them. And some of them are really angry about that kind of depiction, but what really has an impact on those filmmakers is some of them pandering to the international film festival tastes, I would say.
SR: Nacim, can you say something about women filmmakers and the kinds of choices they face orwhat about actresses and what is the kind of surveillance or monitoring that they are subjected to?
NP: So, again, that is another complex situation within Iran. Up until 2000, when you still didn't havedigital cinema as such, and you could really count the number of filmmakers in each context, Iran had more female filmmakers than places like the U.K., for example. It was still much smaller, obviously, I don't want to give this image in comparison to male filmmakers, but in comparison to other contexts, it was healthier.
And after the digital revolution and the possibility of making films just with your own camera, that liberated a lot of people and they have a film festival, which is called Parvin Film Festival, which really celebrates female filmmakers. A few years ago, when I checked, they had a thousand entries and of that, 90 percent were women.
This goes back to the context of women being highly educated in Iran, and we can talk about that a little bit later. So, female filmmakers in Iran, in terms of numbers, they're relatively high in comparison to other places. We have some very good female filmmakers, some quite acclaimedin the world.
However, it's not easy. Even the recognition of their films outside, when, for example, I want to show films made by women, either they haven't been restored or subtitled properly. So, that is because when I curate films, and I wanted to curate one particular season of films just made by women, I couldn't find them of high quality.
So, there arethose issues. They are more closely monitored because even a simple act of not wearing your hijab properly means that you're making a political statement. And recently we've had quite a number of both filmmakers, but especially actresses who decided to unveil in solidarity with themovement in 2022.
And now they have been banned, some of them being imprisoned. The most famous one is Taraneh Alidoosti and they're not able to work anymore. And that's simply becausethey appeared unveiled. There are a lot of other ones in addition to Taraneh Alidoosti.
SR: Let's stay with themovement in 2022waves of protest led by Iranianwomen, triggered by the tragic death ofMahsa Amini.
The movement chose for itself the slogan: Women, Life, Freedom an put the fight for reclaiming bodily autonomy at the heart of a broader struggle for reforming the theocratic body politic of the Islamic Republic. They were met with brutal repression and although they were also able to of course extract some concessions from the regime to begin with, what's happened to the movement since then, since the last two years, it's sort of gone out of the Western press, but I'm sure you could tell us about the aftermath of these protests and how women have still managed to continue solidarity networks despite the repression.
NP: I think the fact that, you know, the, the repression was so brutal meant that there aren't that many, or there aren't any public protests as such. The punishment for that is really, really high. a lot of people were saying, especially the diaspora, there's going to definitely be a change, there's going to be a revolution coming. That obviously didn't happen, but what has happened is a change in people's attitude. So, one can talk about a revolution within the culture of, of that society of people now not being afraid ofshowing more hair.
In fact, I was watching a videolast night of queues tothe Contemporary Museum of Art in Tehran, and I was quite stunned to see how many people, how many women were actually not wearing their hijab. This would have been impossible three years ago before the movement happened. So, I think now that that taboo has broken, women are still having these individual acts of resistance and not conforming.
There was a student who stripped down to her underwear because she was being harassed by the university's morality police about the type of scarf she was wearing. And she got so infuriated, she just stripped down to her underwear. And since then, they've suddenly announced that there is a treatment in a clinic for women who remove their hijab.
So, they're pathologizing this women's choice of bodily autonomy. So, this removing of mandatory hijab is something that's like a disease, it needs to be cured, and they need to be taken away. And what they're saying is that they are providing scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal.
So, there's this constant trying to push against the boundaries, different kinds of reaction. But the reality is that they haven't been able to, “control the women” in the way that they wanted to. So even if legally, not much has changed. in fact, now we have these kinds of clinics like a rehab clinic being set up. The announcement was made last week, and yesterday women were standing in the queue to get into the museum quite a number of them without the hijab.
SR: So that's one of the real contradictions between this new hijab and chastity bill, which was passed last year by Parliament and then approved by the Guardian Council, and the fact that, um, since at least 1979, uh, there has been a large scale empowerment of women through excellent educational access, for example,and one of the important concessions, victories, rights, which women have won are in the area of the possibility to seek divorce. Of course, all of this is framed in terms of Islamic law, but the interesting thing is women are able to avail themselves of assisted reproduction technologies, of in vitro fertilization, equally surprisingly to me, third party donations of sperm and egg are allowed to some extent, and even surrogacy is supported by the Shia religious authorities and the state, something which the Meloni government in Italy istrying to outlaw.
So, in fact, what I also read, and I wanted to ask you about this, there's a possibility to transition, which is available inIranpartly state funded. So could you explain how these kinds of choicesin terms ofreproductive technologies, in terms oftransition, surrogacy, how would these be reconciled with extremely restrictive societal norms imposed by the regime. But these are all choices which are interestingly somehow legitimated in terms of a Shia religious ideology.
NP: So in terms of the women's educationafterthe revolution, because a lot of public spaces were Islamized, such as universities, schools, a lot of families that came from a religious backgroundsuddenly allowed their daughters to enter into spaces where they would have not before the revolution because they used to consider universities to be far too secular, westernized, inappropriate fora traditional religious girl to attend.
And this resulted in a very largeproportion of women having access to places their mothers and grandmothers would have never even imaginedaccessing. And over time, their views of the world and the way that they wanted to live their lives differed from that of their own families. It also allowed them to enter society andparticipate in public life, even though we can see that in relation to the number of women who are educated and the number of employmentfiguresamongst women, there is a discrepancy.
In terms of the Shia jurisprudence, that's a really interesting one because the Shia jurisprudence argues thatyou have to use your intellect to discuss matters, which would have not been discussed during the time of the Prophet necessarily. So, things like IVF or maybe transitioning as it's not something that would have been, uh, discussed during the Prophet, and we don't have any the religious sources referring to them.
So this kind of opens up their hands a little bit. And I have to say from the outset that there isn't a homogenous view onwhether this is permissible or not amongst the Shia clerics. So, there are a diversity of views, but what matters is who is in power, regardless of the religious authority and religious hierarchy.
And those who are in power have opted for these positions. With transitioning, this wasconsidered to be permissible by Khomeini. He had already referred to it in his treatise before the revolution, but after the revolution, a trans womanseeks an appointment with him, talks about her own situation, andKhomeini says, yes, that is allowed.
And the way they have discussed this is that a person is made of a soul and body, the physical body. And sometimes there's a discrepancy between the soul and the body. And when that happens, it's permissible and you need to bring this harmony between them. And in factwhen families attend these surgeries to discuss it either with the surgeon who's going to undertakethe procedure or even with the psychologists, they always have Khomeini's treaties, especially for religious families, to show them that, look, this is perfectly fine. And the kind of vocabulary they use is this is actually a sign of God's creation and wonder. Andthis is something that we should understand in this scheme. So, they kind of use religious vocabulary to make sense of something that might be difficult for some religious familiesto accept and kind of package it in that way as part of a religiousdiscourse, it becomes permissible and acceptable. Now, this might sound really nice, that it's possible for trans people to undertake sex reassignment surgery within Iran. But that comes with a caveat, because we need to understand that homosexuality is forbidden in Iran. It has some of the mostbrutal punishments against it if it is proven that somebody is a homosexual. Again, they've made it so difficult to prove that, unless somebody has actually witnessed the act, you can't prove somebody is homosexual. Having said that, they're using the sex reassignment surgery as a way to cure homosexuals.
To say thatif you are attracted to a person of same sex, then it means that you're of a different gender and you need to undertake thatsurgery. So, there are also these issues, so not everybody who undergoes that surgery might necessarily be a trans person,people who have a same sex desire are forced to undertake this.
SR: So, what are the grounds on which women can file for divorce, for example?
NP: There are quite a number of them. If, for example, the husband does not provide, you can prove for six months that they haven't provided for you the material aspects of it. But also, if you can prove that you've not had intimaterelations with a husband for six months,then that's grounds for divorce. There are quite a number of them, for example,what he does would damage your reputation, is one of those, you have to prove that. If they are a drug addict, if you can prove that they're abusive, and have records from, from the doctor.
SR: Let's talk a little bit about the assisted reproduction technologies and the ease with which couples, not just women, couples have access to surrogacy, to in vitro fertilization, et cetera, because in a way, I think,what the history of modern Iran shows is a back and forth between state concerns about underpopulation and overpopulation. It's been oscillating between considering the country to have too many children and as having too few children. By the late 1960s, the Shah's regime had started promoting a wide range of birth control techniques with assistance from the United Nations and the Population Council. Then while in the first few years after the revolution, the new Islamic Republic moved towards pronatalism, primarily on religious grounds. It also then changed course after it saw the results of the census in 1986. Since then, there's been a dramatic fall in fertility in Iran. The fertility rate has dropped from 6.5 children per woman in 1980s to around 1.7. And of course, women's access to education has something to do with that with near universal literacy. Sixty percent of students in Iran are women. However, you now have the problem of an aging population, which is unable to avail itself of social welfare measures because ofpartly the economic sanctions imposed on the regime, but the fact that many are trapped in poverty due to economic hardship.
So could you talk about the demographic trends and this change of policy from antinatalism to pronatalism and now how the regime grapples with also the demographic impact of emigration by young Iranians on the one hand, and the influx of a large number of refugees, for example, from Afghanistan on the other, towards whom the regime was relatively hospitable over the years, but has started talk about sending them back.
NP: So with IVF, it is again the Shiajurisprudence that comes to the aid to justify the use ofthese kind of technologies, IVF to assistcouples for having children. Again, not all Shia clerics agree on thatbut this has been something that has allowed Iran to actually become one of the centers for IVF in the region because most of the Sunni countries do not allow for this. They have a large number of centers across Iranthatpeoplego from different countries to get that kind of treatment there. Andthey allow sperm donation and egg donation. Well, the sperm donation is a bit problematic because what they're saying is that you cannot have the sperm of another man given to a married woman, because that would be considered a problem. There are talks of women who divorce their husbands, get the sperm donation, have it fertilized, and then after they've waited for the waiting period of three months, which they have to wait, they remarry their husband. So, there are rules and regulations in Iran, and there's always ways of getting around itand you find a way to do what you want to do. Well, with most things, not everything, obviously. There are, there is the practice that's been going on for a long time. In the 90s, I remember clinics giving out free contraception,different types of contraception, when you would take yourbaby for checkups or vaccinations, the nurses would give it to you, they wouldencourage, so it wasn't just that it happened before the revolution with the Shah'sattempt at breaking down or controlling the population. And then there was a change towards, no, we need to grow the Iranian population. We need togrow the Shia population. I have listened to some of the clerics talking about the fact that one needs to have five, six, twelve children for a couple. They celebrate families who have many children innewspapers and bringing them to the television stations and kind of celebratinggrowing the Shia population. So that's the kind of discourse. And now they talk about all of those attempts at controlling population as a betrayal to Shi'ism. So that's the, the approach that they have taken.
With the Afghan population, we have Afghan refugees who entered Iran in the early 80s, so they are a third-generationpeople from Afghanistan who still cannot access citizenship. Iran does not naturalize. or provide citizenship to foreign residents. Unless you're a woman and you have married an Iranian man. In that case, you automatically qualify to become an Iranian citizen. So, if a woman from Afghanistan marries an Iranian man, the children will automatically only be Iranian, but she also qualifies as being an Iranian citizen.
The opposite is not possible. And I think this goes back to also a very nationalist kind of discourse in trying to create this difference and othering between the Iranian population and especially people from Afghanistan,in that sense, there is a quite a racist outlook atthe Afghan population, both from the state, but also from the Iranian people themselves and not wanting to integrate them. And now there is this push of having themleave. However, whilst the state is trying to do that, there are some within the state who’re talking about now consideringpeople who have been living in Iran for a very long time, who are from Afghanistan on taking on Iranian citizenship. And I wonder if this is in response to trying to increase the population within Iran. But it's a very contentious issue, and there might also be a resistance from the Iranian population itself.
SR: So let me turn finally,Nacim, toanother aspect of this demographic change. About a decade ago, half the population of Iran was still under 35. It was a very young society, uh, slowly aging because of a fallingbirth rate. But Iranian society is also urbanized at a remarkable rate so that by now almost three quarters of Iranian citizens are living in cities. Both these shifts, the demographic and the urbanization shift, tend usually to go hand in hand with a larger degree of secularization.
Now, many young Iranians, especially in urban centers, are increasingly turning to more secular ways of life. And then you have a section of the population, still devoutShias andbelieve inreligion as theirpersonal belief, but also support a theocratic regime.
How does this kind of popular support for the regime play out today? What extent of support does it enjoy? And what sections of the population have turned their back on religious orthodoxy and have become increasingly secularized? And how does that play out in terms of just everyday life in Iranian society.
NP: So, I want to first start off by talking about a survey that was undertaken in 2020 by two academics in Netherlands. They were of Iranianheritage, andthey were talking about how their perception, anecdotally, of what Iranians feel about religion and their religiosity is different to the kind of surveys that come out both within Iran and in the West. So, for example, the World Values Survey showed a significant number of people who attested that they were religious.
And what they did was, they created the survey that had VPNs that didn't have any kind of personal identification attached to it. And they came up with a completely different set of results. And what they said was that actually it was this skewing effect of fear. Because for those kinds of surveys, you had personal details of the people you surveyed. You either kind of did this through their phones or you knocked on their doors. And even though these were international surveys, they were usually subcontracted to local people who would be monitored. If you come and knock at somebody's door and say, are you religious? You would obviously say, of course, because you know what the implications of that is in an autocratic regime.
The survey, which they titled “Iranian Attitudes Toward Religion”, which was conducted inJune 2020, had 50,000 respondents to it. And of those, 90 percent of them lived in Iran. And approximately half of the population reported that they have lost their religion. And around 60 percent reported that they do not pray. And 68 percent of them believe that those religious prescriptions should be separated from politics. And so, religion and state should be separated. They have asked these questionsby age, by background, and you can see all of the breakdowns, but just the overallaspect of it, to see thatover 50 percent of the people say that they're not religious anymore.
It's quite striking because Iran was a religious country before the revolution, and in a way the Islamic Republic has resulted in the loss of religion amongst its population, a large proportion of it. And I was looking at the statistics and only 33.2 percent said that religion was important to them. The rest were saying either it was not important to them at all, or it was kind of slightly important to them.
I think that is a really interestingsurvey. The results are very telling, and they align more with what we knew, but knew anecdotally. It was our own impression. And now we have the survey that actually shows that this is what people do think. They did another survey in 2022. This time they had 200,000participants andover 157,000 of them were in Iran.
And their question was, is it yes to Islamic Republic, or no? And 81 percent of the respondents within Iran said no. Ninety nine percent of the Iranians outside said no, which wasn'tverysurprising. But even going back to demographics, apparently around eight million of the Iranians live outside Iran, a large portion of Iranian population. And there's a big brain drain as well. And that has its own complications within Iran. They [Iranian diaspora] have shown that they can be a force sometimes, especially in 2022, when there were these large-scale demonstrations, and they were forcing their own local governments to take a stance against the Islamic Republic. But it's also, with any other brain drain, it's restricting the resources that are available within Iran. So yeah, there are quite a bit of complications happening there as well with that.
SR: Thank you so much, Nacim, for this fascinating set of insights into the very complex relationship between politics, cinema, cultural production in general, gender and demographics in Iran. Thanks so much for the interview.
NP: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you.
SR: Nacim has covered a remarkably wide range of topics, from cinema and culture to women's protests and demographic concerns, to provide us some fascinating insights into the multiple contradictions of Iranian society today. These contradictions are easily overlooked if we focus on the theocratic regime's official ideology, but also if we adopt the exoticizing gaze of so many external observers. It was for this reason that we began our conversation by focusing on cinema. As Nacim explained, there are tensions between a tendency among some Iranian filmmakers to cater to these expectations of exotic difference and the sizable Iranian diaspora's anxiety about such representations of its otherness.
Instead, it's much more interesting to focus on the internal contradictions and constraints that define the very limits of the possible for Iranian cultural producers as they devise ingenious tactics of navigating and also circumventing censorship as well as social taboos. Since the early days of the Islamic Revolution, the regime has tried to turn cinema into an instrument of cultural education.
But in effect, Iranian cinema has become a medium that provides new ways of resistance or even sometimes of open rebellion against authoritarian oppression. As Nacim pointed out, thanks to women's access to education in the Islamic Republic, the number of women filmmakers has increased exponentially.
Many of these women directors and actresses have not shied away from openly expressing solidarity with protests such as the recent ones in 2022. Brutal repression followed those mass protests. But Iranian society seems to have crossed a threshold, with more and more women actively and publicly defying the religious strictures imposed by the authorities.
I've already broadcast an earlier podcast two years ago on this subject. Thus, today we are witnessing, as Nacim points out, small, individual, but nevertheless brave acts of resistance, still, such as women refusing to wear the mandatory head cover in public. Much like in some recent films, these everyday acts of negotiation are gradually morphing into the breaking of these religious taboos.
It shows how the indomitable spirit of democracy as a way of life can also emerge for ordinary individual refusals every day to be afraid or to accept submission to the rules of an oppressive regime. However, Nacim has also emphasized that the regime is still relatively stable and has managed to contain resistance through its harsh reactions including prison sentences and punitive pathologization.
But in other contexts, the peculiarly religious framing of what counts as normal and what counts as pathological can also paradoxically offer chances to some persecuted minorities such as transgender people who can escape punishment by undergoing sex reassignment surgery. Ironically, while the grounds for such unexpected freedoms may be restrictive to accord with Shia religious dogma, they stand in sharp contrast with the recent ultra conservative attempts to negate the very existence of transgender identities as in the U.S. today.
Overall, as Nacim's other examples of assisted reproduction using in vitro fertilization, egg donation, sperm donation show, Iranian citizens have found creative ways of coping with, as well as of circumventing, religiously codified rigid rules that govern the most intimate aspects of their lives.
Besides, the regime itself has shifted some of its strategic priorities, including its demographic priorities, over time. Given the surprisingly high proportion of Iranians for whom religion is becoming increasingly irrelevant, it remains to be seen how long the regime of the Islamic Republic will be able to maintain its authority. The examples Nacim mentioned today suggest that mass democratic resilience will continue to challenge this hegemony more and more.
This was the third episode of Season 10. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks’ time when I will discuss with Cara Daggett her idea of petro-masculinity to understand why we urgently need today a feminist energy politics.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, and of course let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www. graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.