Demonstrating the power of film as a vehicle of political dissent, an initially banned film titled Marmoulak, which portrays a convicted criminal who masquerades as and eventually becomes a Muslim cleric, has been released in Iran. Marmoulak, which means “the lizard,” is a satirical stab at the privileged status of Muslim clerics in Iran’s Islamic republic. The clerics were not amused and demanded that the film be banned; film critics find it hysterical, and in Iran, the film is an enormous commercial success.  

Having Kamal Tabrizi’s Marmoulak released in Iran is no small victory. The press enjoys relative freedom in Iran, but the conservative judiciary certainly frowns upon the notion of an unfettered media. The satellite dish — wildly popular and often available in the Middle East despite various governments’ restrictions — is available in Iran, and over 80 percent of Iran’s population watches television.  

While America and the Coalition Provisional Authority is busy shutting down legitimate venues of political discourse and political dissent, such as al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, others are continuing to use popular media and specifically film as an avenue of social, institutional, and political criticism. Earlier this year, the Turkish minister of culture and tourism permitted Ararat, a 2002 film by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, to be screened in Turkey. Ararat, which depicts the events of 1915 in which droves of Armenians were expelled from modern-day eastern Turkey, is arguably virulently anti-Turkish. In blunt terms, it accuses Turkey of state-sponsored genocide of the Armenians living in Anatolia.

The version of Marmoulak currently being screened is not the pure voice of unconstrained political and institutional critique — the original version of the film has been edited to make it, presumably, less offensive to both individuals and to members of the religious establishment. It is, however, a legitimate, widely available, and hugely successful forum for political expression in the Islamic republic of Iran; and that’s more than can be said of America’s approach to the issue of political dialogue and dissent in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka