An Iranian filmmaker laughs off censorship
Daniel Nelson
If you are an Iranian film director and you keep being censored, banned and/or jailed or forced to flee, what do you do? Make a film about it, of course.
Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, Maryam Moghaddam & Behtash Sanaeeha, Saeed Roustaei, are among the most famous of the banned who have won international awards and accolades and are considered among the world’s best. The list of those who have been censored would need more space than I have at my disposal.
Mohsen Amiryousefi has faced several bans, and in The Banning Curse he challenges what he calls “Guidance” head-on, using humour as his chosen weapon.
Filmed in his apartment, it is a conversation about his career with the Angel of Death, who repeatedly instructs him to say his final prayer, and sometimes with Prince Jezel, “who started the Iraq war with a candle”, supplemented by clips from his own films. His interlocutor is relevant because many of Amiryousefi’s films have dealt with death.
His latest film was screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival, which billed it as “a hilarious cinematic autofiction about the highs and lows of radical filmmaking … A balance of biography and constructed fiction, the filmmaker’s own life and Iran’s turbulent political, social and cultural history is entwined via a rich trove of archive footage.”
It’s funny because censorship is usually foolish and absurd, and sad because state harassment harms people. Amiryousefi has many amusing anecdotes about Guidance, including a discussion about the morality of a shot of a man and a woman on a bike. It turned out ok because there was a bag between the two. Another film, about a vasectomy, was banned for four years; others waited even longer for approval.
He also has time to take a swipe at a couple of other Iranian film-related topics, such as the 1978 Rex cinema fire in Abadan which killed between 377 and 470 people after, it is widely believed, Islamic militants locked the doors and set it ablaze. Coincidentally, in 2022 Mohammad Rasoulof and another filmmaker, Mostafa Al-Ahmad, were detained for making a social media appeal for security forces to lay down their weapons and not suppress protests after a building collapse in Avbadan and Jaffar Panahi was detained and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence when seeking information about Rasoulof’s arrest. Cinema, repression and protest seem to go hand-in-hand in Iran.
Amiryousefi is optimistic about the chances of it being seen in Iran. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said, “Luckily, nowadays there are so many ways to show films to the people. There are a lot of spaces, and virtual screenings and streaming, so you can see people following Iranian films in those ways.”
He reckons that after 20 years of film-making he has been banned for a total of 25 years.
And in a parting shot the credits acknowledge “special thanks” to Guidance and the Censor Board “without whose help this film could not have been made.”