Leaking truth to power

The history of Iranian directors smuggling secretly shot films out of the country is longer than many of us think.

- RANJITA GANESAN

In the mid 1970s, Marva Nabili, the second woman ever to direct a fiction feature in Iran, snuck the negatives of The Sealed Soil in a suitcase into the United States. About a village girl who vehemently refuses to marry, her film touched on the disruption modernity caused when it first knocked on rural doors — one of several reasons why the ruling Shah was losing favour in his country then.

Nabili was part of the first new wave of Iranian cinema, much less discussed than its post-Revolutionary counterpart - the second wave, led by the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. She did not take government permission to make her almost-Brechtian feature. Instead, she used her credentials as a state-funded telefilm director to get away with recording in villages where officials generally barred access. Nostalgists like to present the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, as a permissive era, but historians frequently describe the restrictions of that period as draconian.