In Iran, the opposition is often confined to the plate. THE kotlet, for example, Iranian meat and potato dumplings flavored with saffron, became a symbol of resistance three years ago. It all comes from a joke, which was circulated when Iranian government spy chief Qassem Soleimani was killed by the US military in Baghdad in January 2020. Some said he was turned into a kotlet. And last January, an Iranian leader, Navab Ebrahimi, was arrested by the regime for posting a photo of kotlet on his Instagram account.
On May 12, the politician and doctor of Iranian origin Nimâ Machouf will give a culinary demonstration at the Cuisine ta ville festival, under the title: “Meal slogans or the art of circumventing censorship”.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement has supported the resistance in Iran since the death of young Mahsa “Jina” Amini, who died last September after being arrested by the police for wearing the veil incorrectly. Since then, 500 people have died in the protest movement. This year, Woman, life, freedom occupies a prominent place at the Cuisine ta ville festival, on the Place des Festivals, in Montreal, which has given itself the theme of migratory issues and cultural integration.
In the kiosk housing Iranian women, the artists Aïda Vosoughi and Maryam Izadifard installed their works on Thursday. Both left Iran to escape repression.
“I am interested, in my art, in female intimacy,” explains Maryam Izadifard. I was doing installations like a bed with a piece of bra. And then one day, the police intervened and closed the exhibition. »
In her luggage, when she came to Canada, Maryam took precisely her grandmother’s bra. “During the war against Iraq, my grandmother sewed bras for other women. For them, bras were places to carry all kinds of things. But here, it has a sexual connotation,” she says. In Iran too.
Aïda Vosoughi uses salt in her paintings to evoke the drying up of Lake Urmia, a salt lake located in northwestern Iran, an environmental disaster of great magnitude. Very involved in the green movement, a citizen revolt which was crushed by the regime in 2009, Aïda does not believe she will be able to return to Iran anytime soon.
Forbidden dance
This is what the Iranian dancer Amar Bayat has also experienced since 1988, who will give an Iranian dance workshop at the festival. Since the Islamist revolution of 1979, dancing has been prohibited for women in public.
“After the revolution, they sent me to teach sport, says the one who then had training in dance teaching. And then they fired me because I played music. It wasn’t dancing, it was just to accompany the children on the march. “In Iran, any film or show must have the approval of the regime, of the Ministry of Benevolence and Morality”, specifies Nimâ Machouf.
Arriving in Canada, Amar Bayat founded an Iranian dance school in Montreal, Khorshid Kanoom Dance Group.
“I said to myself: I will teach girls and do a lot of shows. I want to preserve Iranian dances, teach them to new generations of Iranians and also to Canadians. »
Some of his choreographies, such as the one about the stoning of women in Iran, have earned him threats from the regime. “I can’t go back to Iran,” she said. I went dancing in front of the Iranian Embassy in Canada. »
Hope always
Cuisine ta ville also offers a screening of films by Iranian filmmaker Leila Ebrahimi Fakhari and a conversation with the artist. One of his films features choreography set to the song Baraye, by Shervin Hajipoor, composed after the death of Mahsa Amini. This song has since become the anthem of Iranian protest. Another film is “based on true stories from a women’s prison in Iran.” It includes activist Sepideh Qolian, sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for supporting a strike. “In the fourth year of my imprisonment, I can finally hear the footsteps of liberation all over Iran,” Sepideh Qolian wrote in a letter from prison last January.
For Nimâ Machouf, the reforms of the current government are useless. “Currently, women can have their bank account frozen, their driver’s license or their passport taken away if they don’t wear the veil. »
Still, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement has “a lot of hope,” she says. “These hopes are not for reforms. People are past that stage. They understood that this government cannot be reformed. The people, what they want is a change of government. The separation of religion and state. A democratic government. Until then, you’ll have to come all the way to Montreal to see the Iranian girls dancing.