Iranian filmmakers head to the Oscars as war engulfs their country
Director Jafar Panahi's "It Was Just an Accident" was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature while protests engulfed Iran and now heads to the ceremony in the midst of war.
By Mohammed Tawfeeq, Sandra Gonzalez, CNN
(CNN) — Two Oscar-nominated Iranian films will have a moment on the global stage at Sunday’s Academy Awards as Hollywood contends with how to address a fraught political reality on a night often seen as a celebration of escapism.
The films, documentary feature “Cutting Through Rocks” and best international film nominee “It Was Just an Accident,” have propelled Iran into one of its most prominent awards seasons in recent memory. The former is the first Iranian documentary ever nominated for best documentary feature.
The nominations arrived in January against an already charged political backdrop, as the Iranian government violently cracked down on protesters, killing thousands. When Hollywood’s biggest stars gather Sunday for the annual awards show it will be more than two weeks into an unpopular war launched against the country by the US and Israel.
Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki, the husband-and-wife directing duo behind “Cutting Through Rocks,” said celebrating the documentary’s success had been difficult amid the turmoil, speaking to CNN’s Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour before the start of the war.
The film is about a rural midwife and motorcycle rider named Sara Shahverdi who becomes the first woman to run for government in her village, fighting for the rights of women and girls. It offers a glimpse into the generational changes that were happening inside Iran.
“It was not an easy journey for Shahverdi, but these small sparks of hope keep me hopeful about what the future can bring,” Khaki said, speaking before the war.
“The only thing that gives me hope about the future of our country is its people — people like Sara Shahverdi in the film, and people like Sara Khaki behind the camera, who share the same mission of bringing change to their communities,” her husband, Eyni, added.
Doing the rounds of awards season has been exceedingly difficult amid the growing uncertainty. Filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose thriller “It Was Just an Accident” centers on a group of people confronting the man they suspected of torturing them in a Tehran prison, has faced impossible situations on his promotional tour.
Speaking to CNN amid the deadly protests in January, Panahi said that even while he was promoting his film, his “heart and mind are there,” in Tehran.
En route to the Golden Globes later that month, he sat in traffic watching video of a morgue near Tehran overflowing with the bodies of protesters, he recently told NBC News.
“Security did not allow us to leave our cars, and I had a sense of suffocation,” Panahi said. Once he reached the red carpet, he said, “I really did not even have the ability to speak. I kept stepping out and trying to create a balance in my mind. I kept going out to smoke.”
He found out about the US-Israeli strikes while traveling from Barcelona to New York to tape an interview on “The Daily Show.”
Panahi’s own history informs his work. He has faced detention, jail and a ban on making films, traveling, and speaking to the media.
“It Was Just an Accident” is his first movie since his travel and filmmaking ban was lifted. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May and was nominated for four Golden Globes.
Iranian filmmakers have had whirlwind awards seasons before. From the internationally acclaimed work of Asghar Farhadi, whose films won Oscars for best international feature, to decades of festival dominance in Cannes and Berlin, Iranian directors have built a reputation for poetic realism, moral complexity and subtle dissent.
On Stewart’s show, Panahi reminded the host that many Iranian filmmakers face prison for their artform and any form of speaking out can come with a greater cost.
“I was watching your show now, if you say one hundredth of what you said in Iran, the sentence would be execution,” he told Stewart.
“I would be killed?” Stewart said.
“Because in our films, we don’t get to one-hundredth of what you said here,” Panahi repeated. “There are many Iranian filmmakers right now who are in prison, and in the past two months that were protests, one of our filmmaker friends got killed on the streets.”
Back in Hollywood, it’s hard to see meaningful acknowledgement of the conflict coming from presenters or nominees who don’t have direct connection to Iran. It will likely fall on the Iranian filmmakers themselves if they get a chance to grace the stage, a triumph that would, in no way, be an accident.
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