My Iranian Paradise

My Iranian Paradise (Mit Iranske Paradis) (2008) Directed by: Annette Mari Olsen & Katia Forbert Petersen Date of birth: 1947, Denmark Country: Denmark Language: Farsi / Danish Runtime: 78 minutes Released: 2008 Genre: Documentary My Iranian Paradise A personal, creative documentary about the connections between Iran and the Western world, seen through the eyes of ordinary people. The director lived in Persia, present day Iran, for the first 22 years of her life. For her, it was the happiest place under the sun â today it is included in Bushâs âAxis of Evilâ. Compelled to draw a line from the past to the present, she travels back to Iran. Through recent footage from the closed and inaccessible country and an abundance of rare and unique historical footage, the film uses the personal story of the director to illustrate not only aspects of present day Iran but also a crucial part in the countryâs history â the time up to the Islamic Revolution, just as oil began to play its part in history. Understanding past Iran will expose the present. My Iranian Paradise depicts a peopleâs condition in the shade of politics â and in the light of history. Annette Mari Olsen Directors: Katia Forbert Petersen & Annette Mari Olsen Producers: Annette Mari Olsen, Karen Hjort & Katia Forbert Petersen Produced by: Sfinx Film/TV with the support of: The Danish Film Institute, Nordic Film- and TV foundation, Images of the Middle East, The MEDIA Programme (EU Development & EU Broadcast funding) & DR. In association with: YLE, TVP, LRT, ETV & BHT. Duration: 58 min. & feature (75-85 min.) Year of Production: 2008 Original Title: Mit Iranske Paradis Release: September 2008 My Iranian Paradise is a personal film about Iranian history and Persian culture by a Danish filmmaker who spent most of her childhood and youth in Tehran. Annette Mari Olsen relates the grand narrative through small stories, as always in close collaboration with co-director Katia Forbert Petersen. The two have teamed up in Danish documentaries for more than 20 years around a shared ambition to promote understanding and build bridges between cultures. The two women filmmakers first met in Poland, at the film school in Lodz, in the early seventies, and later hooked up again in Denmark. Katia Forbert Petersen originally fled Poland with her parents in the late sixties and has since, mainly lived in Denmark, working as a photographer, director and producer. The child of a Danish-Polish couple who met in Iran, Annette Mari Olsen lived 22 years in Iran in her childhood and youth. After years of preparation, she has now made a film about her former homeland, My Iranian Paradise. Since starting Sfinx Film in 1988, the two filmmakers, who mainly speak Polish in the office,have produced a variety of stories about people living in the modern, multicultural reality. A significant vision for Sfinx Film/TVâs productions, they say, is promoting insight into and understanding of what happens when people from different cultures meet. They know it from their own lives, and say, smiling, âInsight and understanding, thatâs what we hope our new film will give the audience.â Axis of Evil Olsen is also the filmâs central character. Taking the audience back in time through her own familyâs history, she offers a far more nuanced image of a country that George W. Bush has branded a member of the âAxis of Evil.â The film features a wealth of characters that Olsen meets on her way â men, women, families, children, women in chadors, a dervish â all held together by Olsenâs monologue referring to her familyâs history and reflecting on present-day Iran. âMy father was a guest worker and my mother was a refugee,â Olsen narrates, framing the film in the story of her father, a Danish engineer who goes to Iran for the Kampsax company to work on the famed trans-Iranian railroad. When his stint ends, her father stays in Iran. He meets a Polish woman, a survivor of Stalinâs gulag who ended up in hospitable Iran on her way back to Poland, like so many other Poles. They marry and have Annette, who enjoys a happy childhood and youth in her beloved Tehran, a city she returns to in her new film. Her family remains in Tehran until shortly before the revolution and Khomeiniâs takeover in 1979. Only a pretext Annette Olsen (AO): My familyâs history and mine are only a pretext to say whatâs on our minds. We wanted to craft a nuanced worldview in a film that speaks about the past but points to the future. Katia Forbert Petersen (KFP): We both grew up in systems that have collapsed. We wanted to convey how fragile an individual is in relation to the big political picture, so we used the personal story, as seen through Annetteâs eyes, to follow the development of a country that the West has had very close ties to historically, but the younger generations only know very little about. It sounds to me that you have a message? KFB: Open your eyes. See whatâs going on in the world. Take a stand. You never know the day before the sun sets. Weâve done a number of what we call bridge-building films about diverse cultures. We were drawing on that experience here. AO: We wanted to make an appeal to multicultural tolerance. There once was, and in fact there still is, room in Iran for all religions. The Catholic church that I grew up with in Tehran still exists there today, although they tread softly. Iran also has a large Christian minority, especially Armenians. Hiden camera How did you manage such a large subject? KFP: We worked on the manuscript for a long time, so the filmâs construction was carefullyplanned. The manuscript was at hand to keep things from spinning out of control. We previously made two childrenâs films in Iran, and in doing so we made friends and contacts. The manuscript, for a large part, was written to sort out the historical facts. Most of the meetings we show in the film were pretty spontaneous. Tell me about the shoot. KFP: We shot ninety percent of the film with a hidden camera, even though we had permits. You need one permit for one street and another permit for another street. We didnât film illegally. We used a hidden camera mostly for practical reasons. Luckily, unpredictable things always happen in documentaries and weâre experienced enough to know how to improvise. Take the scene of the woman at the Polish cemetery, for instance. A very moving scene ... AO: Yes. This woman has a life thatâs all her own. She has her own peace in the cemetery she tends, even though the religion it represents isnât her own. That doesnât matter to her. Nor does it matter to the man by the bridge, who asks me if I can make out the writing on one of the ombstones for the people who died building the bridge. He watches as the Star of David appears â the symbol of the Mosaic faith, I tell him. IRANIAN WOMEN Youâre especially critical about the situation of Iranian women? AO: The film should not be seen as saying that everything is well in Iran. Many different women wear chadors. One forthrightly lists what she has witnessed by way of violence, incarceration and execution. She used to be in exile, but she never really found her place abroad and returned to Iran. Naturally, she appears in the film under an alias. KFP: Freethinking people in Iran end up in jail. Thatâs what it was like in communist Poland, too. AO: Iran is a land of paradoxes. Take the woman who had a nose-job, like so many Iranian women. Itâs almost like sheâs wearing a hairband. I wouldnât even call it a scarf. Women defy the rules, even when representatives of the authorities are all around. They donât speak up. One day they will, maybe, when they feel like it. (An article by Tue Steen Mûller)

Director

Annette Mari Olsen & Katia Forbert Petersen