Clevelanders can get an authentic, insider’s view of contemporary Iran when master Iranian filmmaker, Dariush Mehrjui, appears in person at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Saturday, November 22 at 1:30 p.m. Mehrjui will introduce and answer audience questions after a screening of his latest film, Santouri the Music Man, currently banned in Iran.
“The most interesting and accomplished filmmaker the United States has never heard of” – The New York Times
Santouri the Music Man (2007) follows a popular singer-songwriter and player of the santoor (an ancient stringed instrument) as he spirals into heroin addiction and destroys his life and career. Variety wrote that the movie “suggests that Iran's current cultural repression and rampant drug addiction are no mere coincidence.”
The film will also show, by itself, on Friday, December 5 at 7:00 pm and on Saturday, December 6 at 1:30 pm for regular admission prices ($8, members $6, seniors $5, students $4, or one Panorama voucher).
Mehrjui is arguably Iran’s greatest filmmaker. His career bridges the 1979 Islamic Revolution and he has the heroic distinction of having made movies that were banned by both the Shah and the Ayatollah. Born in Tehran in 1939, Mehrjui studied film and philosophy at UCLA during the early 1960s. His 1969 film The Cow proved a turning point in his nation’s cinema.
It introduced Iranian cinema to the West, laid the groundwork for the Iranian New Wave of the 1980s, and perhaps even preserved cinema in the Islamic republic. (The Ayatollah Khomeini was reputedly a big fan.) Among Mehrjui’s 20 other movies are The Cycle (1974), which prompted the Shah’s censors to ban him from ever making another movie in Iran, and Hamoun (1990), which was voted the best Iranian film ever made by the Iranian film journal Film Monthly -- www.clevelandart.org
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