Shiite Hollywood for which audience?

Charso Press: The first edition of the Ammar Film Festival, or as mentioned on its website, the “People’s” Festival of Ammar Films, was held for the first time in 1389. As the organizers of this festival have claimed in the “About Us” section of their official website, “In 2019, on the first anniversary of the 9th of January, it was natural for the TV to show movies with the theme of “Sedition”, but this did not happen. For this reason, a number of cultural activists decided to try their best to bring these films to the people. In this way, the first period of the festival was screened in about 30 cities with about 19 works. This festival, which is remembered by the late Nader Talebzadeh as its founder, has now reached its 13th period, and its secretary, in the absence of Talebzadeh, is Sohail Asad, whose real name is Edgardo Rubin, an Argentine missionary of Islam and a cultural activist in Latin America! In Iran, the TV audience knows it through the documentary “Jhanshahriha”.

A strange sentence

At the press conference of the 13th edition of Ammar Film Festival, which was held on Monday, November 16, in memory of the unknown martyrs of Ekbatan, Tehran, Asad said something that became the news headlines: “We must start a Shiite Hollywood!” Explaining what he said, he continued: “The culture and lifestyle of the Islamic Revolution must become global after forty years, because humanity needs this model.” Although this explanation did not clarify the dimensions of that commandment sentence and only added to its ambiguity, it was also a reminder that such a claim has been repeated many times and under different titles since the beginning of the Islamic Revolution of Iran. A claim that Ahmad Talebinejad, a well-known writer and critic of Iranian cinema, told Hamamihan: “To analyze his words, we must go back to the beginning of the revolution, a time when some people believed that we should move towards Islamic cinema, but they were never able to understand the basics of this cinema. explain and define Islamic and for example answer the question that if we show praying, fasting and such things in a movie, will that movie be included in the field of Islamic cinema? And basically, how can art – an industry rooted in the West, born in Europe and grown in America – be turned into an Islamic discourse? While many of the foundations of social life throughout Iran’s history have not been Islamicized as they should. Such comments, in my opinion, are throwing an arrow in the dark, and the intention of the speaker can only be considered to be popular with higher authorities, otherwise these people themselves know that such a thing is not possible. At one time, the field of Islamic thought and art, which was later renamed to the field of art, was supposed to do the same thing that this gentleman wants to do now, that is, to create an Islamic Hollywood or a Shiite Hollywood, but it did not happen and there were a thousand and one reasons for its failure, and one reason is that some Ideologies do not have the necessary capacity to become global. This movement has changed its name several times, from semantic cinema to religious cinema, and every time some people came and got funds to explain its principles and rules, but they never got anywhere.”

He continues: “We observe in the history of cinema that some countries set up film production centers based on Hollywood and, for example, in India, they made Bollywood or in Italy, Spaghetti Western, which was an imitation of American Westerns, but none of these It did not have the desired results, and the Bollywood movie had nothing to do with the Hollywood movie, and basically, it did not have an impact on people’s lifestyle as Hollywood did. Therefore, in my opinion, such comments are tongue-in-cheek and the speaker is crooked, as the old saying goes. These words are not thought-provoking and realistic, and the speaker is not familiar with the practical realities of what he is saying.

An ambitious position that does not fit in the potential of Ammar

This “bullet in the dark”, as Ahmad Talebinejad calls it, seems strange to Hossein Sultan Mohammadi, a film critic and cultural expert, and he told “Ham Mihan” about it: “If he intends to say, we want a production center for a collection of ideologically oriented works. , cultural, special attention to the oppressed of the world, liberation movements and such movements, or even starting a resistance front, he could have used better words, in my opinion, he did not have a good choice of words.

He continues: “The fact that the organizers of the Emar Film Festival think that they can have an exclusive view in this field as a base, in my opinion, is a kind of verbal idealism and raises the question why this festival should have an exclusive view on this issue?” And can’t Oj, for example, make such a claim and use such words? Or the field of art? And even the Maqavat film festival? In my opinion, if they have the same ideal and think that, considering their history of showing films in areas without theaters and even distributing produced films in the region, using this word is a verbal propaganda act, I don’t think that such a thing is so simple in the structure of the Emar Film Festival. It is possible.”

We know Hollywood as a group that produces feature films, does Ammar Festival want to get involved in this matter or continue to follow the path of its activity in producing short and documentary works? This is a question that Sultan Mohammadi says in response: “In front of such declaration of opinion and identity, many questions are raised. When you mention Hollywood, it means that you have to specify many things, including that you have to make policies, define the path of capital injection and how to attract your forces, specify what productions you will have with what horizon, in what network you will distribute them and so on. … As a result, it needs a lot of preparations, and I think that mere words cannot express the angles of a strategic or strategic movement. It may be a starting point, but with respect to the organizers of the Ammar Film Festival, I don’t think such an ambitious announcement will fit into the potential of this festival, unless there is a very strong logistics or preparation for it.”

Shiite Hollywood for which audience?

In addition to the absence of all that Sultan Mohammadi refers to, another question is who will be the audience of this Shia Hollywood? A question that Talebinejad answers: “When America establishes Hollywood, it considers the people of the whole world as its audience and offers its films to the whole world. If you want to make a Shia film, where do you want to export it?” An example in this field comes to mind. I remember when the Taliban had left Afghanistan and this country was going through its republican era, Ahmadreza Darwish’s movie “Duel” was shown in Kabul with the idea that the Shiites of Kabul would flock to watch this movie. This film was on the screen for a week and I remember one of the people who was responsible for the release of the film in foreign countries said in a private conversation that even the cost of the film’s crew going to this country was not covered by showing it in Kabul. In fact, we don’t have anything called a Shia market in which we want to show Shia movies. When we label a work as Shia, we actually exclude a part of Muslims, Sunnis, from its audience, as well as those who do not like this ideology, so as I mentioned, Shia Hollywood is an illusion and will never reach the stage of action.

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