Tehran's voiceless generation

A bold young filmmaker has exposed some home truths about Iran, writes Rosemary Neill

GRANAZ Moussavi was a schoolgirl living in Tehran when she was told that sunglasses were unIslamic.

Then 16, she had been hiking with friends when religious police demanded they remove their sunnies. "Then they broke our sunglasses under military boots," recalls Moussavi, a hint of steel in her girlish voice.

Moussavi, 35, grew up in Tehran during the early, febrile days of the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was a time, she says, when wearing jeans or brand-name sneakers, owning home video recorders - even laughing out loud - were banned or frowned on. "Laughing aloud was a matter of criticism because it was a time of war [the Iran-Iraq war] and revolution."

Moussavi is now an Australian citizen, poet and trailblazing filmmaker whose debut feature film, My Tehran for Sale - shot undercover in Iran - seeks to "capture the voice of an unheard generation". Here, Moussavi is referring to her generation of Iranians, who were born into an era of hardline fundamentalism but who, behind closed doors, lead double lives of quiet rebelliousness and everyday resistance.

According to Moussavi, things have changed a great deal in recent years in her restive homeland., so much so that younger Iranians, "who are much more resilient, vibrant, and fearless than us [her 30-something peers] . . . find the sort of restrictions I grew up with beyond comprehension. I was four when the revolution happened. It was only afterwards, when I looked back, that I could see how illogical and surreal those restrictions were."

Moussavi's intensely personal movie is the first Australian-Iranian feature film collaboration and it illustrates how, away from the religious enforcers, Iran's urban youth behave much as young people do anywhere: they go to underground raves and concerts, smoke pot, drink, flirt, have parties and pre-marital sex, albeit often risking arrest for doing so.

Moussavi, who lives in Adelaide, is "a bit critical of the way the mainstream media has portrayed Iranians through the last three decades". She hopes her film will take people beyond the religious-fanatic and exotic archetypes. "What I wanted to do in my film is to focus on ordinary middle-class, urban people. They are not seen, they are not heard and they haven't been captured on film," she tells Review.

My Tehran for Sale, which is released in Adelaide next week, stars Moussavi's close friend Marzieh Vafamehr, a gravely beautiful actress whose real-life theatre work in Iran has often fallen victim to the censors. Vafamehr plays the lead character in the film, also called Marzieh. She's a theatre performer whose work is banned and who meets Saman, an Iranian-Australian, at an illicit rave.

The couple soon become engaged. They plan to marry and settle in Australia, but a shocking discovery scuppers their plans. Desperate to leave Iran, Marzieh turns to a people-smuggler, with grim consequences. Moussavi is "very proud" that her film is the first unofficial Iranian-Australian feature film co-production. My Tehran is produced by Julie Ryan and Kate Croser's widely admired film Ten Canoes. It's funded by the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival, while the cast, crew and story-line are largely Iranian. Most of the dialogue is in Farsi, with occasional bursts of English. Two of Iran's most celebrated filmmakers, Bahman Ghobadi and Abbas Kiarostami, helped with the film's early development.

My Tehran has already been nominated for the Independent Spirit Prize in the Inside Film Awards, to be announced the day before the film's release, for a compelling film made under difficult conditions. Certainly, shooting a film under the radar in one of the most politically repressive countries on the planet was hairy. The rushes were stored digitally on hard drives and smuggled out of Iran in Croser's and Ryan's backpacks. There were daily power cuts, exterior scenes were shot quickly to avoid detection and the Iranian crew was not told the film had Australian producers lest the Iranian authorities get wind of this.

Moussavi, some of whose poetry has been published illegally in Iran, is clearly hardened to such conditions. She calmly downplays the hazards: "I can understand that for the Australian members of the crew it was perceived as hectic or stressful, but for those of us involved in the Iranian film industry it was the norm. We were blessed, not encountering any major issues or problems."

When we speak by telephone, Moussavi is in Canada where her film recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. To the writer-director's relief, all three sessions sold out, one of them just an hour after tickets went on sale. The film also has been shown at the Vancouver and Pusan film festivals, and Ryan and Croser are in talks aimed at releasing it in Sydney, Melbourne, the US and Canada.

Moussavi migrated to Australia in 1997 with her family, having endured a five-year wait for visas. After she arrived in Australia she worked as a social worker with refugees and migrants and as a volunteer at Woomera Detention Centre, an experience that colours her film. "What I witnessed in Woomera was very inhumane and inconsistent with the values of wider Australian society," says Moussavi. "Australia is such a different world outside the detention centres. Completely different values were practised in the detention centres back then. So un-Australian and so inhumane."

Unfortunately, neither of Moussavi's parents lived long enough to see their daughter write and direct her tribute to her generation back home. Her mother died of cancer eight years ago, aged 50. Her father, a television sound engineer in Tehran, drove taxis in Adelaide before he died four years ago. While Moussavi is deeply saddened that her parents' new, promised life here was short and bittersweet, she feels Australia has been good to her. "I personally have considered myself very lucky because I never faced any major issues or obstacles here," she says.

She studied screen studies at Flinders University and attained a graduate diploma in editing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 2005. In Iran she is a well-known poet, with four volumes of poetry - including one underground volume - under her belt. One of her collections is in its fourth edition. "This is very unusual for poetry," she says, allowing herself a shy boast. Her poems have been translated into French, Kurdish, Swedish and Portuguese (but not English) and she has given readings in France, Vienna and Luxembourg.

Although she is flourishing professionally, Moussavi suffers from the nagging melancholy of the adult migrant, never completely at ease in her birth or adopted country. "I see myself as living in between Iran and Australia. In the end I don't feel I belong 100 per cent to anywhere. It is a strange situation," she says, her voice trailing away.

She was in Iran for the contested June election and the mass protests that followed. When asked whether she was involved, she says warily: "Everyone was involved. It was hard to find people who were not involved."

Although the dodgy election result was not overturned, she believes Iranians remain hopeful their country will soon become democratic. "If there was no hope there would be no reason for people to take risks," says the young filmmaker, who is clearly unafraid to take risks of her own.

My Tehran for Sale opens on Thursday at Adelaide's Trak Cinema.