Iran in focus

Of all the countries you'd want to visit these days, Iran is probably not at the top of the list. But for Barbara Scharres, director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Tehran has become a regular destination. For 16 years, the Siskel has run a festival of films from Iran every fall, and Scharres regularly attends the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran looking for the best work.

The Siskel's groundbreaking festival began about 17 years ago when Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, a film professor at Columbia College, approached the Film Center with what at the time seemed like an unusual idea: Show Iranian films. Scharres was intrigued enough to look at some movies, and what she saw dazzled her. Iranian filmmakers were dealing with serious moral and ethical issues, but doing so with visual inventiveness and a surprisingly emotional style.

"Iranian acting styles are more emotive than we are used to," Scharres says. "People talk fast and shout a lot. But there's also a lot of contemplative stuff about moral and ethical issues. So you may go back and forth between long scenes of someone sitting in their study mulling over a problem and scenes of people shrieking at each other. It has different kinds of rhythms than we are used to in American films."

Scharres was hooked, and knew that she wanted to go through the logistical complexities necessary to show these films. That effort has paid off; the Siskel has played an instrumental role in exposing to the world Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us, A Taste of Cherry) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler, A Moment of Innocence).

Scharres has been focusing on Iranian cinema long enough to see the torch pass from the older directors, like Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, to a new generation that has its own distinctive approach. "Younger filmmakers are working in a digital format," she says. "The features that are digital tend to be much more urban than many of the 35mm features."

The new generation is taking advantage of lighter digital equipment to shoot stories that are extremely controversial in Iran. "We're showing a film this year, Mohammad Shirvani's Navel, and just the situation it depicts is probably one that would run into censorship problems," Scharres says. "The story revolves around roommates in a Tehran apartment: four are single men and one is an Iranian-American single woman who may or may not be pregnant by another Iranian man. For Iran, it was quite shocking."

Finding an audience hasn't been a problem—the festival regularly draws large crowds. The challenges are more political. "The filmmakers are definitely a problem since September 11, because it is much, much harder for them to get a visa," Scharres says. "The visa process has been made as difficult and prohibitive as possible for Iranians." The Siskel has gotten around that by inviting filmmakers who were fortunate enough to get green cards in the U.S. and filmmakers who have non-Iranian passports.

Ironically, the success of the Siskel's focus on Iran has created a new problem: It's getting harder to get prints because the films are now in big demand. "Trying to find dates has become a real challenge," Scharres says. "We often trade prints with the Vancouver and Mill Valley Film Festivals, juggling films so they can be at two festivals based on timing of shipping the prints. We have to be coordinating with them all the time."

The Festival of Films from Iran runs throughout October at the Gene Siskel Film Center.