The home of cinema and the ayatollahs

Casa del Cinema, Rome, Villa Borghese. Organiser: the Iranian Cultural Institute, the official body reporting to the Islamic Republic’s Organisation for Islamic Culture and Communication. Films produced by the regime are being screened, such as "The God of War", directed by Hossein Darabi. A war drama produced by Owj Arts and Media Organisation, which sounds like an independent production company but is in fact the audiovisual arm of the Pasdaran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, established after 2009 to dominate the screen following the occupation and suppression of the square in Tehran. The film centres on Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, regarded as the ‘father’ of the Islamic Republic’s missile programme. One has to look rather closely to realise that what we are actually witnessing, at the Casa del Cinema in Rome, is a large-scale Iranian propaganda event.

Where have all the film festivals gone that used to pay tribute to the Iranian cinematic dissent of the likes of Kiarostami and Panahi? In Venice, all the talk is now of Gaza and anti-Israel sentiment; in Rome, this charade orchestrated by the ayatollahs. Why is a public venue in Rome, run by a foundation that organises the Film Festival, lending its prestige and venue to an operation that in Tehran would be shamelessly termed the ‘cultural front of the revolution’? Siamak Pourzand, a contributor to the French film-criticism magazine *Cahiers du Cinéma* and a hero of Iranian dissent who took his own life by jumping from the sixth floor of his home in Tehran, once asked his torturer in prison, who was ‘interrogating’ him: ‘This question wasn’t on the list; what am I supposed to say?’ The Casa del Cinema in Rome can and must showcase Iran. But it must specify which one. Whether it is the Iran of dissent and Pourzand, or that of Khamenei and the god of war.