For the Iranian writer and director Amirali Navaee, portraying his country is not about depicting sadness and tragedy, which he feels has come to define the onscreen portrayal of his home in recent years.
Iranian filmmakers have been as much in the news as their films have been over the past decade. The writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran last year after being sentenced to eight years in prison while finishing “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which tells the story of a family torn apart by protests that were violently crushed by the Iranian government in 2022-23. His harrowing journey has been well-documented, and the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, with Rasoulof in attendance, where it received a special award from the competition jury. It was later nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.
The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose films “A Separation” (2012) and “The Salesman” (2017) both won Oscars for best international feature, refused to attend the Academy Awards the second time he won in protest over President Trump’s executive order that blocked entry of citizens from Iran and several other predominantly Muslim countries to the United States.
And “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Panahi has been imprisoned several times in Iran because of his work but has continued to make movies in defiance of the Iranian government.
For his first feature-length film, Navaee (pronounced nah-vah-YEE), who is also a choreographer and visual artist, said he wanted to express something more complex and less overtly political than other Iranian films. The project, “Sunshine Express,” debuted in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is making its British premiere at South by Southwest London on Wednesday. Shot in a warehouse in Tehran on a small budget (Navaee, 42, said many of his friends helped finance the movie), it tells the story of people in a role-playing game on a train headed to a place called Hermia in the hopes of winning a cash prize.
They agree to remain in character, but some contestants become suspicious during the journey, which sets in motion several plot twists, all laden with Kafkaesque surrealism and allegory. Navaee talked recently by video from Paris, where he is on a six-month fellowship at the Cité internationale des arts, about his film and Iranian cinema and its place on the global film stage. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Tell me about “Sunshine Express.”
I read the essay “The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel, which is about how a totalitarian state gives different roles to different people and then tricks them into keeping these roles. “Sunshine Express” is about how to rule people. When you’re completely stuck to your role, then totalitarianism can rule you. But the movie is also about people taking care of each other.
In Iran, the economic pressure is really high for people, and people live with a lot of fear. The reaction to this fear is that we try to take care of each other. And this is why I love my country: because people, at the end of the day, do just that.
How do you see Iranian cinema at this juncture?
When we talk about Iranian cinema, everybody thinks of social realism. Everybody thinks of hand-held cameras in the street, somebody screams and something bad is happening. In the 1950s, this movement started very slowly, but then by the end of the ’60s, it was one of the biggest new waves around the world, like, by Amir Naderi or Sohrab Shahid-Saless, who were the biggest names in Iranian cinema and inspired a lot of people. But then Abbas Kiarostami changed it, in a way, because he makes films not about social realism but about people trying to find life in harsh situations, which is very beautiful and poetic.
You were born in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war. How does that affect your work?
The first time I saw a bomb in the sky falling, I thought it was fake and very beautiful because it was night, and I was 5 or 6 years old. It was like a fantastic image to me. But then when it hit the ground, the fakeness was over, and I could hear people screaming and everything.
This is how war really affected me, though I think wartime was one of the best times of my life, because, and this is not easy to say, but people were amazing back then. They took care of each other so much. When we went to the basements to take shelter, everybody would sing and drink and be with their neighbors. When the sirens were blaring, my father used to say, “You’re going to meet up with that girl who is your neighbor pretty soon.”
Do you see your screening at South by Southwest as a catalyst for attracting a bigger audience?
Yes, I know that South by Southwest in Texas has premiered a lot of important films. It also tends to be a somewhat younger audience, and I think in London it will be an audience that is not only just cinephiles but also people who work in start-ups and this type of thing, which is very interesting for me.
Tell me about the name of the town, Hermia, where the train is bound in “Sunshine Express.” Is that named after the character in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”?
Yes, I love Shakespeare. He opened the doors of drama to me. I started reading him in English. My uncle was a translator, and I started learning the English alphabet before the Farsi alphabet. My idea for Hermia is about a city where women can choose easily for themselves without being told what they must choose, which is very, very sad when you see it happening in Iran. Women are under so much ideological pressure there, which hurts me.
Does that love of literature, along with that hurt, inform your movies?
The cinema that comes out of my country these days is only about sadness. But we don’t just live like that. When we do social realism, we must show both sides. You can make unhappy movies, but you need a counterpoint for it. If you show light, you have to show darkness. And without darkness, you will not understand what light is.
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