The Laughing Radical

Bearded and brooding, Massoud Dehnamaki hardly comes across like the director of a blockbuster comedy film. He spent three years fighting on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War. After returning home, Dehnamaki joined an Islamic paramilitary group called Ansar-e Hizbullah, a militia accused of attacking theaters showing films that were deemed un-Islamic. That was then. His current film, Ekhrajiha 2, an Iranian Hogan's Heroes, has shattered all box-office records in the country, raking in a whopping $6.1 million as of last week.

"I had to get into film because the realities that I knew of war weren't being shown," he says in a low voice, flanked by a director's megaphone on one side and a box of mortars, a prop from the movie, on the other. "That's why I had to roll up my sleeves and talk about my own generation to today's generation."

 

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It's not a message that Iran's youth, bombarded by the latest Britney and Black Eyed Peas videos on illegal satellite channels, would seem inclined to hear. But Dehnamaki has drawn in audiences by using slick, Hollywood-style action sequences—he cites Oliver Stone and Saving Private Ryan as influences—and plenty of raunchy humor, some of which is directed at the country's leaders. "I almost died from laughing," says Said, a spike-haired 20-year-old, after a recent showing. "There were jokes in this movie that you don't hear in public." Perhaps more important, Dehnamaki has struck a deep nationalistic chord by showing Iranians with different political viewpoints sniping and fighting but ultimately cooperating in the film for the sake of national unity. In the last scene of Ekhrajiha 2, Iranian POWs line up, under the watchful eyes of Iraqi guards, and a band begins to play "Ey Iran," a beloved pre-revolution anthem that's rarely performed in public. At a recent showing of the movie in Tehran, a handful of misty-eyed audience members stood up to salute as the POWs sang onscreen. Since the movie came out on March 21, long lines and packed movie houses—some featuring folding chairs in the aisles to cram in more moviegoers—have become the norm. At one prominent roundabout in south Tehran, three theaters facing each other are all showing the movie, and each is selling out. "You must first draw the audience to the theaters," Dehnamaki, 40, says with a wry smile. "And then you can talk to them about certain things."

Dehnamaki's mix of Western style and distinctly Iranian themes isn't on display only in movie theaters. In recent years, young Iranian artists have begun infusing their works with many more homegrown motifs. An exhibit currently at the Araan gallery in north Tehran highlights the digital drawings of Arash Hanaei, which show scenes from the religious festival of Ashura along with the tombs of war martyrs. The effect is jarring. One piece is a reproduction of a huge martyr's mural from a prominent Tehran street, but done in a graphic style, like a panel from a comic book. On a recent afternoon a number of hip young gallery hoppers, decked out in tight jeans and loose-fitting scarves, sipped tea and checked out the artworks, some of which have sold multiple prints. Several musicians are also gaining a huge following by blending Iranian and Western styles and touching on issues that hit home with younger listeners: drug addiction, corruption and an oppressive social environment. At the top of the pack is Mohsen Namjoo, a 33-year-old musical prodigy from the small town of Torbat-e Jam who's studied classical regional instruments like the dotar and sitar. Namjoo mixes traditional sounds with Persian poetry and rock and blues beats in songs that are often thinly veiled critiques of the Iranian government. "Whenever I've wanted to laugh at the contradictions in my society," Namjoo writes on his Web site, "I use the laughter and playfulness of the blues scale and its singing style. I blend it with the Iranian scale and singing style." His music has become so popular with Iranian youth that reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has adopted Namjoo's song "Hamrah Sho" (which translates as "Come Along") for his campaign. "It's a cultural morass," says Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a professor of sociology at Tehran University. "The youth will listen to a local singer, they'll listen to religious singers during Ashura and they also listen to black-market stuff. It's really amusing."

For his part, Dehnamaki, a slightly built man with a quiet demeanor, draws on his own experiences in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War for Ekhrajiha 2 and its predecessor, Ekhrajiha. He's never had any formal film training—a fact that irks the filmerati in Tehran, who regularly pick apart his movies' technical shortcomings in op-eds and TV interviews—and his background is about as far removed from the arts as can be imagined. He ran away to join the military at the age of 16 and spent three years on the front lines during the war, where he was wounded by mortar fire and exposed to mustard gas. After convalescing at a Tehran hospital in 1986, Dehnamaki ran away to the front lines again. Two years later his unit was one of the first to cross the Iraqi border and enter Halabja, shortly after Saddam Hussein's Army gassed the town's. "It was horrific," Dehnamaki says, shaking his head. "It was a normal town, where everything appeared normal, there were cooking pots on the fire, but there's no one breathing. The birds are dead, the animals are dead, the people are dead. It's one of my most bitter memories." These painful experiences helped Dehnamaki build a deep sense of camaraderie with his fellow soldiers. "The friendships of that era made you feel like you had known each other for 100 years. It's indescribable," he says. "The war has been over for 21 years, but we still get together often. Some of the guys have prosthetic legs, prosthetic arms or glass eyes. But what's interesting is, when we get together, we only laugh."