PERSEPOLIS
James Mottram talks to Marjane Satrapi about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the way the experience inspired her award-winning animated film Persepolis
itting across from me in a tartan-walled basement of a London hotel room, Marjane Satrapi cuts an imposing figure.
Arms folded, with an all-black outfit reflecting .
her mood. the Iranian-born 38-year-old is in town to discuss Persepolis. her much-praised animated feature based on her popular series of graphic novels. The film. which shared the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes last year with Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, depicts her life growing up in Iran at the time of the Islamic Revolution. Despite the character being called Marji, don’t dare call it autobiographical, though. ‘I don’t like that term.’ snaps Satrapi. ‘An autobiography is a book that people write to solve the problems with those around them. They don’t dare to say things to their family and friends, so they decide to write in revenge. That is not what I did.’
18 THE LIST 24 Apr—8 May 2008
L I. " '5)’ N
It’s not all BLAUCK
n W
This is typical of Satrapi, who comes across as belligerent, argumentative and contentious at the best of times. Maybe she has good reason. She harbours genuine distaste for the way joumalists in the West portray the Middle East. ‘The image in the media — calling people terrorists, fanatical, etc — is extremely condescending. It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name. that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.’
Yet. it’s in her homeland where the film has been causing a stir. ‘An unreal picture of the outcomes and achievements of the Islamic revolution” was how the head of the govemment- affiliated Farabi Cinema Foundation described it in a letter to the French cultural attache’ in Tehran. Subsequently withdrawn as the Opening film from the Bangkok Film Festival. after pressure from the Iranian embassy, it also won‘t be seen at a Lebanese cinema near you. for fear of provoking unrest among supporters of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Satrapi claims the film isn‘t meant as a political tract. ‘1 think that people who see the politics [in it] need to find an answer — and they want to give me a responsibility that I don’t have to have,‘ she says. ‘I didn’t want it to become a movie with
the pretensions to become this lesson of history, politics, sociology. I'm not a sociologist. I’m not a politician. I‘m not a historian. I‘m one person. If you start with one person, this one person is universal. If you want to make a history lesson,
5 or olitics. there is nothin ’ less universal than 2:
these things. Tolstoy used to say. “If you want to talk to the world. write about your village“.’ Yet it didn’t help matters that. back in