“S O S IN TEHRAN": A NEW AND FRESH LOOK AT THE IRANIAN SOCIETY. 

By Behzad Zolnoor 

PARIS 5 Mar. (IPS)          A man tells of his desire about committing suicide, a young girl about killing her authoritative and alcoholic father and another man of his dissatisfactory sexual intercourse with his wife. These few scenes are shot, among others, at Dr. Majd Group, a private cabinet of psychotherapy in Tehran, in the magnificent movie documentary " S O S in Tehran", made by Mrs. Sou Abadi.

Produced in 2001 and awarded best documentary movie at the Brussels Film Festival the same year, this moving documentary of 84 minutes was selected and greatly acclaimed at different other International festivals, among them IDFA (Amsterdam), Dokumenta (Munich), World Films Festival (Montreal), Amnesty International (Amsterdam) and Asiatica Filmmediale (Rome) etc. 

About what does today’s Iran think of? This is what Mrs. Sou Abadi intends to tell us. For that purpose, she has filmed during five months in “direct camera” in places where people comes to confide and confess: “Seday Moshaver”, or “The Voice of Adviser”, an anonymous help centre by telephone, the Imam Khomeini Committee for the most Deprived, a charity organisation, the mandatory courses of premarital sex education of the Health Ministry, a marriage broker agency held by the die-hard-Muslims as well as in the Dr. Majd Group.

The cabinet of Dr. Majd was an important choice, for it would help us to capture the preoccupations of the well off and comfortable class in Iran. What was of interest to us in the Group’s therapies was the presence of people with a high capacity of auto-analysis. One of great shrewdness”, observes Mrs. Sou Abadi.

Here, in Dr. Majd’s Group, the man who talks of his desire about putting an end to his days has a very uncommon way of talking about it: An irony hidden behind a smile that is at the same time both melancholic and nostalgic: One of mocking the death. Why then to be afraid, and of what? Doesn’t this remind us of the man, “without identity" of “The Taste of The Cherry" (Gold Palm award of the Cannes International Film Festival-1997), of the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami? The main character of this movie also wanted to commit the fatal act, “without obvious reason", but the taste of a cherry brings him back to life.

A nervous and depressive society?

Dr Majd had even proposed to former Mayor of Tehran, Mr. Qolamhoseyn Karbaschi, (who was jailed for some months) to add some antidepressants to the water of the Capital, a proposal that made laugh the Mayor of the time.  

How does one live after 23 years of Islamic republic? Poverty and the big socio-cultural messes, the very results of the 1979 Islamic revolution, followed by a devastating and bloody (Iran-Iraq) war and then the high birth-rate of the eighties that saw the population nearly doubling. 

During nearly all this time except for a short recent period, a lot of people felt at least one fear or another, facing phenomena that had developed within the young Islamic republic: arrest, imprisonment and execution.  

Sou Abadi’s movie shows us that those fears that seemed to have yield the place to “hopes" of a whole population, continue to remain a real preoccupation in this paradoxical society where the confrontation between tradition and modernity seems more and more obvious. Hence the rift between “conservatives” and “reformists” within the State’s institutions and even inside each individual, divided between two different opinions.

Likewise, the Director notes also that during filming in the Imam Khomeini Help Committee, the employees are well aware of the realities of the situation prevailing in Iran: “They would tell us desperately that private charity would never respond so much poverty”, she said.

 “The desire for producing this film was born in reaction to all these Iranians films that we saw during since sometimes”, Mrs. Sou Abadi explained, adding: “I knew both the middle class Iranians as well as those in rural areas, and I would realise that their realities were completely different from the Persian fairy tales where everyone think of love and poetry”.

No doubt that with 70 percent of the Iranian population under 35, the youth of this country make Iran one of the world’s youngest nation, a youth in which one can detect a certain number of acts of individual resistance by diverting and bypassing knowingly Islamic laws as far as possible.

For instance, while the Psychiatrist, basing himself on the fact that there is a lack of social relationship between Iranians of different sexes, thinks that today's Iran goes in one side back to the year 1000 while, on the other, to 2000, a young girl, during her therapy at the Group, would suggests, half serious half laughingly, to a friend to get herself a “boy friend” via internet.   

"By making this movie, I wanted to give a realistic photography of the present Iranian society, without complacency or animosity”, explains Mrs. Sou Abadi during an interview, hoping to be able to point to both the complexities and paradoxes of this Iranian society. ENDS SOS TEHRAN 5302