Iranian filmmaker bridges deep political divides with irreverence

Masoud Dehnamaki, a former militant, has broken box-office records with his irreverent film about the Iran-Iraq war.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 4, 2008 edition

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Tehran, Iran - Masoud Dehnamaki's office is no longer made up to resemble the front line of the Iran-Iraq war, with sandbags, helmets, and gas masks – and a sign requiring preprayer ablutions before entering.

And few hints remain that this slight, black-bearded former militant was once a leader of violent vigilantes called Ansar-e Hizbullah. In the late 1990s he wielded a club – and the pen of the hard-line newspapers he edited – to provoke lethal clashes with students and attack reformists.

But Mr. Dehnamaki is a serial iconoclast, and remains so even as he shifts targets.

Today, those right-wing credentials are enabling the war veteran-turned-film director to challenge prevailing myths about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, an event that defined Iran like no other since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Perhaps only Dehnamaki, among the pantheon of Iran's gifted film directors, could get away with the irreverent portrayal of the war in his film "Ekhrajiha," ("The Outcasts"). In taking that tack, he reveals how the sanctity of the "sacred" war, as the conflict is called here, is being redefined.

"The message is that this country is for everyone, with different political tendencies," says Dehnamaki, who volunteered at 16 to fight and spent three years on the front line.

"It's breaking the clichés, and many people did not like that," he says of the film. "In 'Ekhrajiha,' we knew how to play with those red lines [about the official version of the war], but did not cross them."

Such political moderation was once sacrilege to Dehnamaki, who in 1999 told the Monitor, "When you see some people here dressed in American-style clothes, you are seeing the bullets of the West."

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