Iran forces Persepolis animated film out of Bangkok film festival

Bowing to pressure from Iran, Thailand has withdrawn the award-winning animated movie Persepolis – which is about a girl growing up and feeling repressed under Islamic rule – from the Bangkok International Film Festival to be held in July 2007.

Chattan Kunjarana Ayudhya, director of the Bangkok International Film Festival, said: “I was invited by the Iranian embassy to discuss the matter and we both came to mutual agreement that it would be beneficial to both countries if the film was not shown.”

“It is a good film, but there are other considerations,” Ayudhya added. Ayudhya is also the director of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

Persepolis, based on the popular French comic books of Iranian director and writer Marjane Satrapi, is about the experiences of a 9-year-old girl living through Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the 1970s. It won a Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2007.

The film drew complaints from the Iran government-affiliated Iran Farabi Foundation when it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

In a letter, published by several news organisations, the Iran Farabi Foundation said the film “presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution in some of its parts.”

The film follows Satrapi as a little girl watching the fall of the United States -backed Shah of Iran. She and her family believe that, with the Shah gone, state repression will end but the film shows that the state repression only worsens.

Persepolis not only criticises strongly the Ayatollahs’ regime, but also lashes out at the Western countries for having backed a tyrant such the Shah by supplying his government with weapons

The Bangkok International Film Festival, which runs from July 19-29, is organised by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, a government agency.

The decision to remove Persepolis from the festival is expected to re-ignite a debate over whether the Tourism Authority of Thailand is the appropriate organiser of Bangkok’s annual film festival, where self-censorship has been an issue in the past.

In all, 99 films are to be shown at the Bangkok International Film Festival.