Hope among Iran's filmmakers after moderate president wins election

Following the election of moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran's filmmakers are hoping for an artistic future without censorship.

"We had a meeting with the president, discussed the censorship problems of recent years and really shook our hearts out to him about them," film director Jahangir Kosari said on Saturday.

After the meeting, he and his colleagues were confident that the Iranian film industry would "breathe again" with Pezeshkian and find a censorship-free path, Kosari wrote on the website Parsine.

However, Kosari still has to be patient with his hopes for better times. His latest film, "I am Forough," about the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, is not allowed to be shown in cinemas on the instructions of the Ministry of Culture, which is still in office.

The ban is partly because the poet Farrokhzad, who is very popular in the country, is one of Iran's leading feminists - and is therefore a thorn in the side of the Islamic system - and partly because of his daughter Baran Kosari, who plays the leading role in the film.

In solidarity with the women's movement, she took off the obligatory headscarf in 2022 and has since been banned from working and travelling abroad. Her picture, the film poster and the film itself are therefore not allowed to be shown publicly, Kosari said.

However, he hopes that this "absurd ban" will be lifted with Pezeshkian and a new minister of culture.

With Pezeshkian, Iranian filmmakers also hope that in future, art and not the headscarf will once again be the main criterion in films.

The women's protests in September 2022 were triggered by the death of the young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, known to her friends and family as Jina. She was arrested by the morality police because a few strands of hair were visible under her headscarf. She died in police custody.

Since then, many women have taken off the obligatory headscarf in protest. Among them were renowned actresses, who were banned from working and travelling abroad as a result. The actress Taraneh Alidoosti was even sent to prison for a fortnight as a result.