Previous/Next sections
Introduction
Memory I : Fragmented identities
1.1 Presenting the unimaginable
1.3 What kind of immigrant filmmaker can I be?
Memory II Essentialism in diaspora
2.1 What part of me is intresting for you?
2.3 Memories of memories of memories
Memory III : The Swedish project
3.2 Re-thinking Us and the Others
Results
4 Navigating the discursive field(s)
In the previous two sections I presented myself as new in the role as “immigrant filmmaker” and how this makes me uncomfortable. So far I have focused on Swedish film production in a historical perspective. In this section, I look further into what productions are actually invested in today, to further understand what ideas and themes are made relevant today. Has there been any shift in discourse or is it still the same narratives and voices that are reproduced? I analyzed the Swedish Film Institute list of grants for the years 2020 to 2022 and looked for both documentaries and featured films, both long and short formats, which portrayed immigrants from Iran or the Middle East in broader sense (including Afghanistan, Turkey and the Levant). This search is not to be viewed as a content analysis in terms of methodology, but rather a contextualization for my artistic research. In the following section, I provide quotes from the Imdb and/or the production companies as an introduction, in order to further discuss the themes and narratives in the films.
Films centered around masculinity norms and lgbt-identities
- Habib & The Thief (short 2021)
Habib & The Thief” follows the intimate relationship between Habib and Amir, their strong bond is undeniable. Unfortunately, it isn’t the time for their love in this lifetime as Amir, pressured by his family, chooses to marry a woman. Their breakup encourages Habib who decides to come out to his own parents.
- Who the fuck is Bobby? (TV movie 2021)
A succession of artists, politicians, sports stars and show hosts land in his chair. Today, Bobby Oduncu is one of Sweden's most sought-after hairdressers, but behind his success is hides also sadness and an unusually tragic story. Raised in Södertälje in a Syriac family with a deeply religious Christian Orthodox father, Bobby put up a false facade for a long time, even though his body and soul yearned for love and touch. When he finally came out as gay, his father didn't want to accept it. This is a movie about the right to love whoever you want, but it's also a movie about picking yourself up after losing someone you love. In the film, we get to follow Bobby in the hair studio together with e.g. Carola, Carolina Gynning and Roy Fares, but we also get to come along to the parental home and to meet with his family.
- Motståndaren/Opponent (long 2023)
When the wrestler Iman's life is put at risk, he takes his family with him and flees to Sweden. Despite the precarious existence in the asylum center, the parents manage to create a safe place for their daughters, but have they really escaped the threat from their home country? A dark secret threatens to tear the family apart - and forces father Iman to confront his past.
Films centered around life in Sweden for migrants (both newly arrived and children of migrants/”second generation”
- Vi var barn då/We were kids (short 2022)
Alexander has gathered his childhood friends in their old classroom to show them a short film he's made about them. A short film about the bullying within the macho culture and the hard jargon that kills young mens dreams from the suburbs.
- Åsnelandet/the donkey country (short 2023)
In the last part of director Bahar Pars trilogy on structural racism the audience is invited to join two women on their journey of avoiding, expressing and ultimately fighting about these issues and the way those affect their life.
- Allting är bra nu/All is good now (short 2024)
Rami is a determined young Syrian who has convinced himself that everything is normal with his new life in Sweden. But soon the pressure of life upended becomes unbearable, the haunting ghosts from his past inescapable. Slowly, the monster he has been running away from breaks through
Films centered around plots in countries in the Middle East
- Lussy (short 2022, Turkey)
Abandoned, distressed and angry dogs roam the streets of a coastal town but a much worse fate awaits them. Just like soldiers sent to battle, women slaughtered by inequality, refugees fleeing war, old people who are good for nothing.
- Abolis resa/Abolis journey (documentary 2021, Afghanistan)
As a 17-year-old, Abolfazl walks all the way from Iran to Sweden. After three years, he is deported and now lands for the first time in his life in Kabul, Afghanistan. Kicki calls from Sweden and says that he has got a job, but now he needs a work permit and ID card to be able to return. Obtaining papers turns out to be more difficult than Abolfazl first thought. The plan is to embark on a dangerous journey to Jaghori, where he has relatives who can verify his identity.
- Costa Brava Libanon/Costa Brava Lebanon (long 2021, Lebanon)
The free-spirited Badri family has created a utopian life in the countryside far from the associations and corruption of Beirut. But the dream is brutally crushed when they discover one morning that the city's growing mountain of garbage has ended up outside the house. Now they have to decide. Resist or bury your head in the sand? Or to do like grandma. Sneak out and get a cell phone!
Films centered around islamist terrorism (the IS)
Sabaya (documentary 2021)
Armed with a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, the father of several children, Ziyad and the other volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center risk their lives to save the Yazidi women held captive by IS in one of the world's most dangerous refugee camps, al-Hol in Syria. Captured, often at a very young age, they have been forced into years of oppression and humiliation and the film follows how their fortunes are reversed when they are allowed to return to life.
- Imads barndom/Imads childhood (documentary 2021)
After two and a half years in captivity, Imad, his little brother Idan, and their mother Ghazala are released into a displaced persons' camp in Kurdistan. Healing from the trauma is hard for all of them, but it seems Imad is having a particularly tough time. Not yet five, he has already spent over half his life enduring terror, abuse, and "training" meant to make him heartless. Speaking only Arabic, he cannot communicate with his family, and the only means of expression at his disposal is violence. He hits and spits, and his only game is pretending to be an ISIS fighter who shoots, blows things up, and kills. This poignant film follows him as he takes hesitant steps on the hard road to recovery, guided and held by his mother, his grandmother, and an incredibly supportive therapist.
The list above is not comprehensive; I have only looked at granted financial support from the Swedish Film Institute and based on the title and crew narrowed it down to these works. There are many other institutions for funding, scholarships and private investors. To only focus on one state institution does hence not give a full picture of the context for film production. It is however one of the most important institutions when it comes to larger budgets and because it implements government policy, it is of particular interest to me. The list of films gives an estimate of what narratives, what characters, what stories and what configurations are appreciated. It says nothing about the applications that are rejected or ideas that never even reach the table of the decision makers at the Swedish Film Institute.
To present oneself in diaspora is a heavy burden. There is always a fear that any given representation will be generalized by the majority populations as a fact true for everyone in our category - be it Iran, the Middle East, Muslims or some other label. The problem with the single story is not the story in itself, it’s how it is perceived and how it can be operationalized by person with different agendas - ultimately, how one single narrative can be applied on a large population, marginalizing the multitude of experiences within this group (Adichie 2009). Stories become representations of history. The untold becomes silences (Elahi 2017).
The themes I have seen in the new film productions show both continuity and discontinuity with the first and second wave of immigrant film in Sweden. This is perhaps most visible in the first category. While films like Jalla Jalla and Wings of Glass depicted cultural and generational conflicts with the case of arranged marriage, the new films illustrate the conflict through unaccepted lgbt-identities. This means that while an East-West divide previously was constructed around gender, it is now sexuality and the freedom to choose who to love, that is at stake. An interesting note is that the three films with this theme all have main characters that are gay men. This again is a contrast compared to the movies at the turn of the millennium, when the protagonists were young women trying to liberate themselves from patriarchal families. Similarities in these films is that migration to Sweden is associated with an opportunity to reach freedom.
The issue of masculinity and patriarchal norms is also present in the short film We were kids with close up cameras in the sweaty faces of young men that try to solve a deeply rooted conflict about who they are and who they can be. It seems the time has come to see the same story as in the past, but this time from the perspective of the fathers and brothers. When the narrative of the violent oriental man is pushed as far as it goes, past the criminal youth in the suburbs, it reaches halt in the camps with the victims of the IS. How can a documentary about this brutality be presented to a European and Eurocentric audience, without falling in the pit hole of the single story? In my opinion, both production manage this balance well, perhaps mainly because the IS-fighters are in the periphery and focus is on positive characters such as the therapist and the volunteers who save women. This provides an alternative figure of thought for the Middle Eastern/Muslim man and his “goodness” in lack of better word, cannot be derived from his proximity to what is defined as Swedish society and culture.
A general observation is the similarities between the new films and what has been produced in the past. In this broad (and in fact non-existing) category of immigrant film, the continuous plot seems to be clash of cultures, refugees struggling with “a ghost from the past” and experiences of segregation and racism. My biggest take away from reviewing these films, is that the films with a plot outside of Sweden seem to have more varied stories. Perhaps it is easier to leave the clichés behind when the film is not about how immigrant experience Sweden. Here, we see a film about street dogs in Turkey, a family that breaks with city life in Lebanon and a young man in limbo, neither here nor there, but with agency and various interactions while in Afghanistan. But what am I to do with this information? Is the lesson to be learned that I, as an immigrant filmmaker, am doomed to either assimilate to the Swedish cinema and ignore the immigrant experiences all together, to join in on the tradition of depicting life of migrants as miserable, or to always and only make movies in Iran about Iranians? The core issue comes down to two questions:
- · What kind of (immigrant-)filmmaker do I want to be?
- · What kind of (immigrant-)filmmakers is there room for within Swedish society?
For me, these questions bring an experience of liminality to the fore, which has dominated much of my life, both in Iran and in Sweden. Truth is, I don’t mind being labelled as an immigrant filmmaker. Migration has been a life-altering experience that defines my adult years. I am an immigrant. My problem with the category is the meaning it is loaded with. If being in this box limits my artistic freedom to a few themes, which all have in common the centering of immigration as a traumatizing event, I’d rather be an Iranian filmmaker, doing movies in Iran, about Iranians, without involving Sweden and immigration. The problem with that is obviously that I haven’t lived in Iran the past 15 years. My connection to the geography is weakened with every old hos that is replaced by a sky scraper in my home town. My friends are scattered all over the world. Even the language I speak is not up to date. I read slang on Twitter and realize I’m loosing touch over the space that remains my imaginary home. Sometimes I dream about Tehran, that I fly over the roofs, the Tehran of the early 2000’s. At the time, I was an angry teenager and I hated everything about our life, the forced religious confessions in school, the lack of freedom. Never could I have imagined that I would grow up and migrate, only to dream of the days when we walked with our oversized boots and coats up and down the long Vali Asr Aveny, for lack of better entertainment.