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Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis – France, 2007
FILMS
The Hollywood effect films, with shining stars, telling stories about Arab-Islamic world, bored us.
For this reason, Marjane Satrapi invented a black and white animated cartoon, in spite of some
colored scenes. Simple, with no refinements like a week magazine cartoon.
Persepolis is the story of Marjane, a child who lives during the Islamic Revolution and the war
between Iran and Iraq. She has a dream: to become the new Messiah of the Arabic world.
Affected by the social transformations due to the end of the Shas régime, she promises to herself to
remain always incorruptible and in line with her liberal and democratic ideas, mainstay of her
family’s education. Suddenly the fundamentalist régime arrives and with it the ousting of women
from the social life. The wearing of veil branches off its roots into conservative women, resigned to
live as submissive. However, Marjane’s ideas become very revolutionary and her parents dispatch
her to study in Europe. Here, after a romantic setback, she understand to be perpetually stateless.
The European intolerance to accept the foreign and the difficulty to feel herself as an Iranian
citizen bring her to be depressed and to live as a tramp until she decides to come back home after
the contract of a bronchitis. Unfortunately, the Iranian social-political contest does not adopt any
positive acknowledgement and the deterioration pervades in a uncontrollable way. The situation
embitters the intolerance and the imposition on the women’s wearing will bring the young Marjane
to divorce from her husband, to leave her native land and go to Paris.
Persepolis’ main theme becomes the expression of diversity. The neediness of new incentives
opposed to the rigidity of a politics united to an extreme religion is put on a funny and touching
animated film.
The director has intentionally chosen to use children’s graphics, in order to “teach” the audience
and to instill, without any special effects, the rigidity of life where a woman is never a woman.
Elena Cuomo
Translation: Selenia Pacilio
Francesco Brancatella: Donne del Sud – Italy, 2012
A video-documentary that lights public’s hope up through seven, touching stories. The stories of
women who live in Southern Italy, in a wonderful but troubled land, and who daily fight against
the plague of organized crime through their work, through culture, education and through the
memory of their dearly departed, killed by mafias. They are simple women, carrying seeds of great
hope for a better future.
Giulia D’Argenio
47
La Maison des Idées • 1