Critical Zone, the story of a drug dealer set in the Tehran underworld, will be one of the highlights premiering in Locarno’s International competition. It will be screened for festival audiences in spite of the fact that the director, Ali Ahmadzadeh, has been receiving threats, harassment and all sorts of pressure to withdraw it from the festival. He will not be able to attend the screening.
Although Locarno is perhaps not the first place people go to see new films from Iran (the last one was screened in 2015), when it chooses a film it sticks by it. According to the film’s producer Sina Ataeian Dena, festival director Giona Nazzaro has staunchly defended the inclusion of Critical Zone in the program and neither the festival, the producer nor the director entertains any idea of withdrawing it. “We are not alone in our fight,” says Ataeian Dena.
Shot just before the uprising that has involved so many women demanding their basic rights, the film is described as a highly topical reflection of the rage and anger in Iranian society, particularly among young people. “We kind of knew it was a matter of controversy,” said the producer, an Iranian who now lives in Germany. “It is a very different underground film, and without censorship.”
Even without seeing the film (read review here), people who Ataeian Dena calls “supporters of the Islamic regime” have been deluging the director with threatening and accusatory messages meant to intimidate him into pulling the film from its international showcase this week. He has also been summoned to appear at interrogations by the country’s security services, reports Ataeian Dena, and is expecting possible arrest after the film airs in Locarno.
This is Ali Ahmadzadeh’s third feature film, following Kami’s Party in 2013 and the fantasy-drama Atom Heart Mother, screened in the Berlin Forum in 2015. Awarded a Nipkow artist’s residency and scholarship from the Berlinale, the director was thwarted from attending when he discovered the German embassy had put up a flag signaling “a chance of immigration” that effectively bars him from entering any Schengen country in Europe. All the efforts of Berlinale’s executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and other festivals were of no avail, and the director was unable to accept Locarno’s invitation to come to Switzerland early. Now the Iranian authorities have ensured his attendance at Locarno is practically impossible.
Ataeian Dena, who is also a director (he made Paradise, Locarno’s last Iranian film, which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize in 2015), is no stranger to political harassment. He was a writer and associate producer on Steffi Niederzoll’s feature documentary Seven Winters in Tehran, which bowed earlier this year in Berlin and has had an award-winning festival run. Even the German Niederzoll found herself under attack and embroiled in a court case to stop the film from circulating.
