The interview was to take place from Berlin via Skype. Then, in the space of two weeks, it was Brussels, Frankfurt… Finally, the connection could be established from a city that Bahman Ghobadi prefers to keep secret. “Right now, they’re watching me, explains the 53-year-old Iranian filmmaker. My e-mail box is potentially hacked, I lie to you about my address, I lie to you about the time we speak. Besides, you have no way of knowing where I am, by observing the room from which I speak to you. Two months ago I was in Istanbul, I didn’t come out of my room, even to drink coffee. I’m not afraid, but I want to stay alive to testify. » ” They “, it is the Iranian secret services, always attentive to the words and actions of opponents, and this, well before the demonstrations of recent months.
“The police were telling me, ‘Get out of Iran, take a suitcase, we don’t want to bother you and we don’t want you to bother us, so leave.’ » Bahman Ghobadi
In the 2000s, Bahman Ghobadi was, along with Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, one of the figures of Iranian cinema. Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 for A time for the intoxication of horses, he found himself, from 2004, in the eye of the storm after the release of his film, Turtles also fly. Shot in a Kurdish refugee camp on the border between Iran and Turkey, the film earned him being designated by the authorities as a separatist. “After this film, as soon as I returned to Tehran, I was arrested at the airport and taken to a separate room to be interrogated. The police said to me: ‘Get out of Iran, take a suitcase, we don’t want to bother you and we don’t want you to bother us, so leave.’ » He describes his nights back then, his door locked, a knife under his pillow.
The divorce between the filmmaker and his country is definitively sealed after the presentation of the Persian cats at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2009. Shot in contraband, without means, the film follows one of the many music groups that play in the basements of Tehran, defying the power. The film showed another Iran, underground, hated by the Revolutionary Guards. Asked by The world, at the end of the first, Bahman Ghobadi declared: “Leaving Iran, I say goodbye to the crazy people. »
The separation took a while. Back in Iran, the director was imprisoned for nine days in a prison in Kurdistan because of the harsh criticism made in Cannes. Bahman Ghobadi then has the choice between remaining between four walls – the fate devolving upon directors Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad, currently imprisoned in Evin prison – and exile.
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