Is a film that passes censorship complicit in an authoritarian regime?

Special Envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalAfter the premiere last Tuesday of a film by a director banned and persecuted in his country, the Iranian Jafar Panahi, the Cannes Film Festival competition screened another Iranian film this Thursday, but with the official seal of state approval, that is, the approval of the censorship. Independent Iranian filmmakers called the Iranian film "propaganda." Woman and child, by Saeed Roustaee. For the complainants, who have not seen the film, making a movie that passes the censorship of an authoritarian regime implies a degree of complicity with the repressive government.

The complaint has had such an impact that another Iranian filmmaker, the exiled Mohamed Rasoulof, who fled Iran last year to avoid prison and presented it at Cannes The seed of the sacred fig tree. "There's a big difference between a propaganda film from the Islamic Republic and a film made under the restrictions of censorship," Rasoulof recalled. And he pointed out that exerting pressure to prevent a film from being shown at a festival "goes against freedom of expression."

Roustaee, for her part, recalled in a statement that her film has no support from the Iranian government. And while it's true that all the adult actresses in the film wear hijabs, as required by the Islamic regime, the director recalls that it's a story "about a woman who stands up to all men and a patriarchal society that tries to take away all her rights, including the right to be a mother."

And so it is. In Woman and child, a widow with two children about to remarry receives a double fatal blow: her fiancé leaves her for her younger sister, and her eldest son, who was staying with his father-in-law, falls out of a window and dies. From that moment on, grief mingles with rage and a need for justice. The woman lashes out at everyone: the teacher who expelled her son from school, the negligent father-in-law, and finally, her ex-boyfriend, who got her younger sister pregnant. Roustaee twists the plot so badly that the whole thing takes on a folioonesque dimension.

Once seen, however, it seems absurd to label it as propaganda; on the contrary, the film clearly portrays the contradictions of a society in which a widow must hide the fact that she has children from her fiancé's family, or in which separated mothers lose custody of their children when they turn seven. And if any film that passes censorship is complicit in the regime that limits freedom of expression, perhaps we should start considering The hunt by Carlos Saura as an example of Francoist cinema.

A total celebration of cinema.

Interestingly, the other film of the day in official competition also has the seal of approval from the censorship, but in this case from the Chinese censorship. Resurrection, Bi Gan's return after the acclaimed Long Journey into the Night, is a stunning exercise in total cinema and artistic ambition. In two and a half hours, the film traces the history of the 20th century in five very distinct segments, each starring Jackson Yee in a different role. The result is an overwhelming celebration of cinema, a torrent of ideas, textures, and aesthetic emotions that range from a Guy Maddin-style homage to silent film, in the neo-noir stylized style that the director masters so well.