With the theatrical release on Wednesday of “Persepolis”, Franco-Iranian director Marjane Satrapi makes the link with the recent wave of protest in her country of origin and salutes the “culture of democracy” of the young Iranian generation.
The one who prefers “speak little to speak at the right time” today says she is full of hope for her native country, where a protest movement – repressed by the authorities – followed the death, in September 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurd detained by the morality police who accused her of having broken the strict dress code imposed on women.
Marjane Satrapi notes a difference in the reaction of the population compared to her generation and that of her parents, who lived “all the traumas (…) of the revolution and the war”.
“Democracy is above all a culture. A culture that my generation did not have”
Regularly in contact with Iranian youth, she believes that “Democracy is above all a culture. A culture that my generation did not have. A culture that they have, in particular because they grew up with the Internet, they had access to an exchange with the whole world, with people of their age, with the concerns of today’s world”.
With Persepolis, Adapted from a comic strip and Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, Marjane Satrapi tells her personal story and shows the repression under the Shah’s regime, as well as the arrests and executions following the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Just a teenager, she was forced into exile, alone, in Austria and then in France.
“We really needed a new generation who was born with (these leaders) and who did not experience all these traumas. They are the ones who can make the difference because they are not afraid of them, they grew up with them”.
However, it will take time, she warns. “In ten months, a regime that has been installed for 44 years does not fall like that, especially when it is violent. But it will happen, I am absolutely convinced of it”supports the filmmaker.
Film about Iran?
Almost 30 years after leaving her country of origin, Marjane Satrapi explains that she now has things in her “very French” And “very Iranian”which she knows better how to reconcile “with time”. She says she found her “method“: “I am absolutely against communitarianism, I hate it. All in all, I have two Iranian friends.”
The director refuses to complain. “I live in Paris, I can do whatever I want to do. (…) The complaint, in these conditions, I find it very indecent”, she points out.
Would she like to make a film about her country of origin? Marjane Satrapi does not rule it out, but not immediately. “Things need time to digest them”, she argues, giving the example of a never-published first draft of Persepoliswhich she thought “awesome”. Reading it again a few months later, she realized that she was “filled with hate, anger”. “I was exactly like the people I denounce except that, in my head, I was on the right side. My rhetoric, my way of thinking, what motivated me was hatred and hatred is never a good engine”, she insists.