♦ This Week Film Suggestions:
The Cow (1969), Taste of Cherry (1997), Close-up (1990), Ten (2002), The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000), Offside (2006), The Cyclist (1987), Hello Cinema (1994), A moment of Innocence (1996), Children of Heaven (1998), The Willow Tree (2005), The Apple (1998 )
♦ Some Leading Directors:
Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, Samira Makhmalbaf
Except Mehruji the latter are known for diffusing the cinema with facts and fiction or documentary and acting.
♦ A documentary on history of cinema in Iran:
Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution
♦ Modern Nation-States and Artistic Expression
US ban on visiting artists ( from http://irishantiwar.org/archives/forum/0001oE.html )
‘Mr Ferrer can’t be with us tonight’
Artists from all over the world are being refused entry to the US on security grounds. James Verini reports
Wednesday February 18, 2004
The Guardian
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Ibrahim Ferrer – US officials considered the 76-year-old Buena Vista Social Club guitarist a security risk.
Photo: Jose Goitia/AP
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In the spring of 2003 [actually, it was April, 2001 – Padraig; see Panahi’s Letter below], the celebrated Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi was travelling to South America from Hong Kong. He did not intend to stop in the US, but his flight path took him through New York’s John F Kennedy airport. There, Panahi, a winner of the Golden Bear award at the Venice film festival who had visited the US several times, expected to while away a few dull hours. Instead, he was detained by officials; because his fingerprints were not on file, he was handcuffed and held in custody for several hours. He was so incensed at his treatment that he vowed never to return to the US.
Panahi’s experience is extreme, but not rare. According to organisations connected with film, theatre, music, opera and dance, new American immigration and visa policies are making it extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, for foreign artists of all sorts to come to the US to perform and show their work.
No one, it seems, is exempt. Last week, at the Grammy awards, the Cuban guitarist Ibrahim Ferrer was supposed to have received an award – but he couldn’t get into the country. The 76-year-old was cited as a security risk. A Peking Opera company had to cancel an 18-city tour because the American consulate in China claimed not all of the musicians could adequately prove that they intended to return home after the tour ended. The South African anti-apartheid leader and singer Vusi Mahlasela had to cancel a good chunk of a US tour because his visa took months to get approved, as did the Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia.
And in late 2002, in a disheartening precursor [follow-up] to the Panahi case, the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, a Cannes Palme d’Or winner and one of the Middle East’s most acclaimed film-makers, couldn’t get to the New York film festival to show his latest work. “It really harms our image – not only in the Muslim world but around the world,” says Richard Pena, director of the NYFF and a professor at Columbia University. “Someone like Kiarostami is not just anyone; not letting him in is going to have a negative reverberation for America’s image around the world.”
Artists from Muslim countries and Cuba seem to have the most difficulty – since the 1980s, Iranians travelling to the US have been fingerprinted – but the trouble extends across the continents. Pena said that Polish film-makers have refused to come to his festival because of the way they were treated on previous visits. And according to Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, opera directors from countries as uncontroversial as Italy and Spain have begun avoiding US engagements. “They don’t want to put up with the hassle,” he says, “which then means that American opera singers are not getting the work abroad they used to.”
While the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 have, understandably, raised America’s concerns about border security, the visa problem did not begin then. Inconsistent standards and opacity seem to have been in place at least since Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, which set out a labyrinth of classifications and sub-classifications for visas. Foreign artists had to prove themselves to be of “extraordinary ability” to obtain an 01-type visa, or of “international renown” to get a P2. Few of them could tell exactly what those numbers and letters meant, much less those qualifications, and the same feeling, it seems, went for most of the examiners at the Immigration and Naturalisation Service. The rules were often benignly neglected.
None the less, by the late 1990s waiting periods for visas had gone from about two weeks to a month or more. In June 2001, the INS introduced a “premium processing” service, targeted mainly at Silicon Valley and its planeloads of south-east Asian and subcontinental computer programmers, whereby applicants in a rush could pay an extra $1,000 to ensure their visa would come through quickly, a fee few artists could afford.
And then September 11 occurred. It did not escape the government’s notice that several of the hijackers had been living in the US on expired student visas. With astonishing haste, Congress passed the Patriot Act and the benign neglect came to an abrupt halt.
Lengthy security checks were required for all those travellers unfortunate enough to be from countries stamped “State 7”, which denotes “known state sponsors of terrorism”, or from “countries of interest”, of which there are dozens. Interviews were mandatory for every temporary work visa, whether the applicant was a basketball player with his team, a computer programmer or a bass tenor. The fingerprinting of Iranians and people from other Muslim countries, previously avoidable, was strictly enforced. Making matters worse, when the Patriot Act went through, the INS (renamed the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and known as USCIS or, by its detractors, Useless), was in the midst of a computer overhaul. According to Jonathan Ginsburg, a Virginia immigration lawyer who specialises in the arts, its systems were in “miserable condition”. However, the main problem now, he says, is the FBI, which has the right to take passports and hold up visa applications for as long as it sees fit.
The insanely cumbersome process of entering America now goes something like this: first, the manager or producer or venue who wants to book a foreign artist must petition one of four USCIS service centres. They must prove the artist is unique, extraordinary or renowned, and that he or she intends to return to their home country after their work is done.
If the petition is accepted, it is then sent to the artist in their home country, and the artist in turn brings it to the US consulate, where he or she is fingerprinted and interviewed. After the interview, the waiting begins, as the consulate sends the application to the Department of Homeland Security and “all interested agencies”. It may take seven weeks, it may take seven months, but – and here the Kafkaesque institutional absurdity really takes hold – the law says that visas can be applied for, at the earliest, only six months in advance. Waits of up to 10 months are not uncommon.
Nor are visa applications that are never returned. “A case can disappear into the ozone,” says Ginsburg. The entire process normally runs from $2,000 to $4,000 per artist, depending on lawyers’ fees, and that does not include travelling expenses to and from consulates. In Iran, there is no American consulate, so someone like Kiarostami must travel to Syria and back – twice.
“We want people to come to the US to enjoy what we have,” says Chris Bentley, a USCIS spokesman. “But we need to balance that with ensuring that we don’t compromise security.”
The results of all this seem pretty clear. As Opera America’s Scorca puts it: “These procedures are leading to diminished exposure of American audiences to great artists and making it harder for US artists to get work abroad.” But the stakes, many believe, are even higher than that. “Art is cultural diplomacy,” says Sandra Gibson, president of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in Washington, which lobbies Congress and USCIS on behalf of hundreds of members. “And it’s just as important as it was during the cold war. It’s as important as when [pianist] Van Cliburn went to the Soviet Union to perform and changed Khrushchev’s mind about the United States.”
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The following is the full text of the open letter to the National Board of
Review of Motion Pictures and the international media from renowned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi. The letter recounts his harrowing experience at the hands of US immigration officials while attempting to travel from Hong Kong to film festivals in South America via New York City. Panahi is the director of The White Balloon (1995), The Mirror (1997) and The Circle (2000).
The National Board of Review bestowed its “Freedom of Expression” award on Panahi for The Circle in December 2000. The Board is a prestigious film-appreciation society (originally established in 1909 as a censorship organization) based in New York City.
April 30, 2001
To The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
As the winner of your Freedom of Expression Award for my film, The Circle, I would like to call your kind attention to what happened to me in your
country, an event which takes place every day in US. I look forward to
seeing your reaction to these inhuman events. Since you have seen fit to
honor freedom of expression, this is something you clearly value, so I would
like to call upon you to defend it. You have honored my film, and I hope
that you and all your colleagues in the US media will dare to condemn the
savage acts of US Immigration officials. I feel that such condemnation would
uphold the values of your Freedom of Expression Award. Otherwise, what would winning such an Award mean for me? And what honor would I have in keeping it? Perhaps if I have no freedom of expression, I should return this Award to you so you may find another figure who would be more appropriate.
In the booklet you kindly sent me together with your Award, I read that the
prestigious film personality, Orson Welles, has already received this Award.
Should I be happy that this great man is not among us now to hear how the
American police behave toward filmmakers and other people who enter your
country? As a filmmaker obsessed with social issues, my films deal with
social problems and limits, and naturally I cannot be indifferent to racist,
violent, insulting and inhuman acts in any place in the world. However, I
certainly do separate the acts of American police and politicians from
cultural institutions and figures, as well as the great people of the USA,
as I was informed my film was very well received by film critics and
audiences in your country. Nevertheless, I will inform the world media about
my unpleasant experience in New York and I hope you members of the National Board of Review, who honor freedom of expression, will join me in denouncing these policies.
* * *
On April 15, I left the Hong Kong Film Festival for the Montevideo and
Buenos Aires Festivals on United Airlines’ flight 820. This 30-hour trip was
via New York’s JFK airport, where I was to stay for two hours and board my
flight to Montevideo. Further to my requests, the staff of all the said
Festivals had previously checked if a transit visa is required, and they
assured me there is no need for such visa. Moreover, the airline issued me
the ticket via NY. Nevertheless, I too asked the United Airlines staff in
the Hong Kong Airport about the need for a transit visa, and I received the
same response. But as soon as I arrived at JFK airport, the American
immigration police took me to an office and asked that I be fingerprinted
and photographed because of my nationality. I refused to do it, and I showed
them my invitations from the Festivals. They threatened to put me in jail if
I would not be fingerprinted. I asked for an interpreter and to make a phone
call. They refused. Then, they chained me like the medieval prisoners and
put me in a police patrol and took me to another part of the airport. There
were many people, women and men from different countries. They handed me off to new policemen. They chained my feet and locked my chain to the others, all locked to a very dirty bench. For 10 hours, no questions and answers, I was forced to sit on that bench, pressed to the others. I could not move. I was suffering from an old illness. However, nobody noticed. Again, I
requested that they let me call someone in New York, but they refused. They
not only ignored my request, but also that of a boy from Sri Lanka who
wanted to call his mom. Everybody was moved by the crying of the boy, people from Mexico, Peru, Eastern Europe, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and … I was thinking that every country has its own law, but I just could not understand those inhuman acts.
At last, I saw the next morning. Another policeman came to me and said that
they have to take my photograph. I said, “never”. I offered to give them a
picture of myself that I had with me. They said no, they have to take my
photo (in the way criminals’ photos are taken) and do the fingerprinting. I
refused. An hour later, two other guys came to me and threatened to do the
fingerprinting and photography by computer, and again I refused and asked
for a phone. At last, they accepted and I could call Dr. Jamsheed Akrami,
Iranian film professor at Columbia University and I told him the whole
story. I asked him to convince them, since he knows me well, that I am not a
guy to do what they were looking for. Two hours later, a policeman came and took one of my own photos of myself. They chained me again and took me to a plane, a plane that was going back to Hong Kong.
In the plane and from my window, I could see New York. I knew my film, The Circle, was released there two days before, and I was told the film was very well received too. Perhaps, audiences would understand my film better if
they could know the director of the film was chained at the same time. They
would accept my belief that circles of human limits exist in all parts of
this world, but in different ratios. I saw the Statue of Liberty in the
waters, and I unconsciously smiled. I tried to draw the curtain and there
were scars of the chain on my hand. I could not stand the other travelers
gazing at me and I just wanted to stand up and cry that I’m not a thief! I’m
not a murderer! I’m not a drug dealer! I … I am just an Iranian, a
filmmaker. But how could I say this? In what language? In Chinese, Japanese or in the mother tongues of those people from Mexico, Peru, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, … or in the language of that young boy from Sri Lanka? Really, in what language? I had not slept for 16 hours and I had to spend another 15 hours on the way back to Hong Kong. It was just a torture among all those watching eyes. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But I could not. I could just see the images of those sleepless women and men who were still chained.
-Jafar Panahi
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And Abbas Kierostami’s letter, following the US rejection of his visa application in September, 2002:
Dear Richard, Bill and Bruce [organisers of the 2002 New York Film Festival – Padraig],
Thank you for inviting me and my film TEN to your festivals. The enclosed
letter will explain the reason why I shall not be attending.
As you see, I was refused an entry visa to the United States of America,
despite the exceptional circumstances and your kind attention as well as the
protection and help of many friends.
I certainly do not deserve an entry visa any more than the aged mother
hoping to visit her children in the US, perhaps for the last time in her
life, or myriads of other urgent cases.
I feel deeply about this unfortunate situation. I am not just sorry
because I was not granted a visa or can not attend your celebrations but as a privileged person with access to the means of public expression and media, I feel profoundly responsible for the tragic state of the world, for the
betterment of which we the public people have not done enough to insure.
For my part, I feel this decision is somehow what I deserve.
(Signed Abbas Kiarostami)
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What is equally startling, though entirely predictable, is that the mainstream British print media – whatever about the US print media, much less the broadcast media in the UK and US – are only now getting round to reporting on all of this. Nothing in the Irish media, of course.
EXCO Cinema 