Before federating several goodwills and deciding to shoot a version of the song Barayeone of the symbols of the movement, put online on social networks on Wednesday, Marjane Satrapi says she needed time to think about how she would like to pay tribute to her native country.
“The Iranian people” requires “support from the rest of the world“, pleads the cfamous comic book author and Franco-Iranian director, at the initiative of the clip. “There is nothing worse than doing nothing!“exclaims Marjane Satrapi in an interview with AFP in Paris, where she lives and works.”I’ve seen a lot of stuff criticizing actresses who cut their hair” in support of the movement in Iran, notes the creator of Persepolis Where Chicken with prunes. “In itself, one can criticize everything. But at least we’re doing something. There’s nothing worse in the world than indifference“.
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On screen, to an arrangement by Benjamin Biolay, the performers are called Camille Cottin, Chiara Mastroianni, Yael Naim or even Hugo Becker and Harry Roselmack, and sing in phonetic Persian. “I said to myself, the French have to sing in Persian, because it’s a message we’re sending to the Iranians. There’s nothing more touching than someone trying to talk to you in your language“.
Marjane Satrapi, who intends to set up an association to raise funds for dissidents, wanted the cast to be mixed: “There are plenty of boys out there getting killed! This thing about us, between women, we are going to save the world, it does not work!“, she exclaims, pointing out that “all the beauty of the Iranian movement” is “to have been initiated by women and joined by men“. The clip also uses some footage from Persepolishis autobiographical work, a bitter reminder that repression is still bloody in Iran, “40 years later“.
Since the beginning of the demonstrations, Marjane Satrapi, one of the faces of Iran in France, has spoken quite rarely. “I haven’t been back to Iran for 22 years now, what am I going to speak for them, I am not a representative of Iranian youth!“, she said to herself. “Go everywhere my interesting to speak on behalf“of the Iranian people,”socially, it would have been great, like Marjane Satrapi the Iranian passionaria… But totally indecent“, she quips.
Like many exiles, she had also grown accustomed to “bury half of herself” and less evoke his native country, to escape the fate of “old Diaspora schnocks who imagine that nothing has changed since they left“. She was however convinced that the marks of support are crucial by multiple video calls with protesters on the spot, when the network works. And even if she does not think that a clip will be able “to change things“, the former student of the French School of Vienna and the Arts deco of Strasbourg remains optimistic.
“The dam is breaking“, and the “revolution“, as Marjane Satrapi calls her, will go all the way. To the point that the one who thought she would never see Iran again during her lifetime, begins to dream of another future. “Since I’m a bit morbid, I made a will“, she confides with a smile: “I said to myself that even if I can no longer return to my country, I should be buried there, so that the loop is complete. Now I see myself roaming the streets of Tehran again, the ugliest and most beautiful city on Earth at the same time“.