Translating hyper absurdity through a liminal position by Babak Parham

The objective of this artistic research has been to reflect on the conditions for filmmakers in Sweden and identify expectations, contradictions and subject positions available for myself within this discursive field. As a point of departure, I use three letters of rejection that I have received during my two years as a student at the Stockholm University of the Arts. The first rejection centers what experiences can be imagined for me, as an immigrant filmmaker. It juxtaposes experiences made in Iran and Sweden as opposite and impossible to combine. The second rejection is in relation to content and story-telling, which raises questions about translation as a dimension of film production. I this section, I argue that while it is my intention to make experiences of hyper-absurdity in Iran penetrable for an audience in Sweden, too much concern over the audience may deteriorate the artistic process. The third rejection constructs myself and my fellow director as immigrant others, scrutinizing our ability to make a film in Swedish, about Swedish subjects. In this section, I explore the meaning of diaspora and how it shapes the conditions of film production. The artistic research is summarized in the final section where I suggest a number of strategies forward in order to move away from the taken-for-granted role of immigrant filmmaker(s). Key concepts: documentary film, diaspora, translation

3.1 Diaspora filmmaker

In 2020 I was going to produce a short film with a fellow immigrant director. The director had arrived to Sweden at a young age and was at the time a student at Stockholm University of the Arts, a program in Swedish which is difficult to enter. We sent the required documents to receive a small grant for the production. None of us thought about the aspect that the decision-maker might assume that he didn’t know how to speak or work in Swedish. It didn’t cross my mind. Sometime after we submitted the application, the case officer called me and told me that they had doubts over the directors’ ability to work in Swedish. Therefore, they would provide us with technical support. We could borrow cameras and supplies. If his movie turned out OK, this would maybe qualify his for financial support in future applications. I was mind-blown. They assumed, based on his name, that he didn’t know Swedish. When I sent additional material and asked for a written rejection with motivation, the money was granted.

What does this memory say about the conditions for us, the immigrant filmmakers, in Sweden? My observation is that the previous films that this director had made, were either set in Iran or Afghanistan and/or centered around main characters from this region. In this film, the main character was a teenage girl. A blond Swedish girl and her parents, equally Swedish. The case officer was hesitant, because the director overstepped the invisible boundaries of his subject position. The immigrant filmmaker is supposed to produce immigrant film. S/he is not free to choose among topics and genres as freely as a filmmaker without a label. The circumstance that this project had nothing to do with Iran, Afghanistan or migration, was a deviant from the beaten track, as was the unimaginable idea of an immigrant director working in Swedish or with Swedish actors. The decision was not for appeal. The scenario could have ended with a no, simply because I could have accepted the role ascribed to us. My own understanding of why I didn’t, is because I resist the position of the immigrant filmmaker, I don’t want it. I distinguish between the immigrant filmmaker and to make film in diaspora, one being an identity, the other an act.

Diaspora is defined as a scattered population, people who once lived together in one place, now displaced in many disparate geographies. As a concept, it challenges the idea of geography bound to nations, it provides an imaginary of spatiality and temporalities characterized by ambiguities. Foucault introduced the concept heterotopia to describe a space that is different in quality compared to the places and nations established within a given time and culture, spaces that are contradictory or disturbing to the dominant discourse (Foucault & Miscowiec 1986). Heterotopic diaspora can dissolve essentializing dichotomies and boundaries that are used to define center/periphery, belonging/non-belonging, nation/diaspora, self/other (Okuroğlu Özün 2013). To produce film in this space is to simultaneously represent, contest and invert the sites considered to be real (Chung 2012).

If I bracket my antipathy for the concept of “the immigrant filmmaker” as a single entity, a second dilemma is what stories can be accessible and at the same time meaningful. If I am not standing steady on any ground, neither here, nor there, whose story is mine to tell and where is my audience? Apparently, according to established institutions with the power to provide funding, it is not my place to make film about “ordinary Swedes”. That is to say, to make film about non-immigrants. Nevertheless, it’s equally complicated to be located in Sweden and make movies about Iranians without constructing us/them as “others”. And to make film about Iran when I don’t live there and can’t get the required legal permits to work there seem even more far away.

During the Toronto International Film Festival a few years ago, the issue of cultural appropriation was discussed in relation to movies depicting indigenous communities through a white settler/colonizer perspective (the Hollywood Reporter 2020). It was argued that white directors do not take on the voices of underrepresented minorities as their own, and that the history of cinema hasn’t valued authenticity. All these are valid criticism of the Hollywood global hegemony over culture production. However, there is also the basic assumption that there are authentic voices, which inevitably constitutes a division between the “real” indigenous and the fake. Transferring this to the context of cinema in Iran and the Iranian diaspora, there are similar discussions about who is a “real” Iranian and who is “försvenskad” (Swedified).

Unpacking this issue, there is (I) a question about when an immigrant is trusted to tell a story depicting Swedes/Sweden, but also (II) a question over what immigrants are more “real”. I can only reflect on this based on my own observations during this time. I see a lot of persons from different origin within arts and media. And among these, it would be a lie to claim that everyone works with the typical themes of migration, racism, identity or culture clashes. There is hence a path to a broader artistic spectrum than the “immigrant topics”. As I see it, at least in cinema, this path has a number of gates and one of the first gate keepers check your language. Immigrant film makers with broken Swedish, or who do not speak Swedish, are automatically excluded from working with these broader stories. Again, this is my personal observations.

When it comes to the “realness” there seem to be a fetishization of the misery of others within arts in general and cinema in particular. This isn’t unique for Sweden. We seem to naturalize the habit of defining a category as our opposite, only to reproduce this category as poor, uncivilized, strange etc. In Iranian cinema, this happens often when middle class filmmakers from the big cities make a picture of life on the countryside, fused with all their own prejudice about rural areas. In Swedish-Iranian diaspora the discussion goes something like this: if you don’t show the suffering of the people under the regime, you legitimize the dictatorship. All art from Iran or by Iranians should therefore include this open, very explicit criticism. For Iranians that work in or travel to Iran, this may be a difficult or non-existing choice, which then reduces their work to the pile of “less real”. This is reflected in which films are accepted from Iran for screening here, which bands are invited for concerts etc. What is considered as “real” reveals what we expect to see, what reality we want to be aware of. We I write, referring to a general collective of art institutions and consumers in Sweden.

Answering the questions for myself, I have no problem with criticizing the Islamic Republic in Iran, I have done some my whole life. But I don’t want to make films with simplistic characters and narratives, which often is the case when the character is constructed around a few stereotypical attributes. The diasporic experience of marginalization and to be reduced to a cliché can be used actively as a language of translation of experiences, from one minority to another. If we within film production, manage to build networks and practices in which we listen in new ways, we can also hear the voices that have been silences. The diaspora film community can thereby be a path to a wider heterotopia in which eventually all our identities dissolve into something else, that is yet unimaginable, but hopefully more characterized by mutual understanding and peace.