The Laughing Radical

The Ekhrajiha movies follow the adventures of a band of wisecracking misfits who bumble their way to the front lines. There's a drug addict, a pickpocket and petty con men in the group. A goodhearted cleric seems to be the only voice of reason in the movies, tolerating the group's raunchy songs and off-color jokes. The movies take slight jabs at the clergy and the government, but the bulk of the humor is crass, and the scenes showing the characters' camaraderie and nationalism often cross over into melodrama. In the first film, a thug named Majid Suzuki heads off to war to impress his sweetheart, and his neighborhood buddies dutifully follow. That movie broke box-office records in 2007, until a bootleg DVD siphoned away more profits. The sequel picks up where the first movie left off, with the gang being overrun by Iraqi soldiers and thrown into a POW camp. While they're in the camp, one group of POWs sells out another and there seems to be just as much animosity between the Iranians as there is toward the Iraqi guards. For years the Iranian government has funded an entire genre of movies, called Defae Moqadas or Holy Defense, which show Iranian soldiers as flawless holy warriors. In his two Ekhrajiha films, Dehnamaki shatters that myth and shows the soldiers as flawed but real people. "I know the war from the bunkers and being beside people like this," he says. "So my viewpoint is not the same as the commanders."

The portrayal has obviously resonated with audiences. In some working-class neighborhoods of south Tehran, viewers come back again and again to cheer the soldiers' goofball antics or to sing along with the anthem at the end of the film. Analysts in Tehran say that at least part of the movies' popularity is due to the broad appeal of the sort of populist working-class ethics espoused by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ethics that Dehnamaki embraces in both films. Ahmadinejad and Dehnamaki have similar backgrounds: both grew up in Narmak, a working-class neighborhood in southeast Tehran, and both headed off to war at a relatively young age. "When you have the rule of populism over society, this is one of the results," says a prominent film critic, who asked not to be named because it could jeopardize his work.

Perhaps predictably, Dehnamaki's high-profile success with Ekhrajiha 2 seems to have only added to his list of critics. Some are military veterans displeased with his less-than-reverent portrayal of the war. Said Abu Taleb, a parliamentary adviser, served in the war with Dehnamaki and was with him during an offensive to capture the Iraqi city of Basra in 1987. When the first Ekhrajiha came out, Abu Taleb went to see it with Dehnamaki. "As I was watching the film, I got angry," he says. "I kept turning to him and cussing him out. I said, 'What is this, you idiot?' " They've stayed friends, but Abu Taleb refuses to see Ekhrajiha 2, even though it's showing at a theater around the corner from his house. "I thought the movie was insulting to veterans," he says. "It's also an insult to the Holy Defense movies."

Then there are Iranians who refuse to see the film, or any of Dehnamaki's work, because of the director's personal history. After he came back from the war in 1988, Dehnamaki joined Ansar-e Hizbullah (Followers of the Party of God). The paramilitary group was accused of attacking student demonstrators, raiding movie theaters and harassing women who wore clothes they deemed immoral. During the '90s Dehnamaki also worked for extremist newspapers, some of which were accused of stoking violence against political activists. He's fond of pointing out that one newspaper, Shalamcheh, was shut down by reformist politicians, and another, Jebhe, was shut down by conservatives. Still, for those who knew him in the '90s, the unpleasant memories linger. "I was on the receiving end of some of Mr. Dehnamaki's verbal attacks," says Seyed Ali Abtahi, a cleric who served as vice president under President Mohammad Khatami. "He was one of the guys who was told, 'Beat this guy' or 'Beat that guy,' and he didn't even ask why—he beat them."

Dehnamaki says he has no regrets about his past. "I defend anything I did myself," he says. "And reject any lies." He insists two principles—"justice and fighting corruption"—have been the driving force throughout his career. That sense of justice drove him to make his first movie, Poverty and Prostitution, a controversial documentary that featured interviews with several prostitutes. The movie was banned, but bootleg copies were widely circulated around the country. Still, critics say that if it weren't for Dehnamaki's background, he would never have been able to make this documentary or to challenge the taboos of the Iran-Iraq War in the Ekhrajiha movies. Dehnamaki takes the criticism in stride. "They can't accept that someone newly arrived has been able to break the historic cinema records of Iran," he says with a smile. "And that without even studying film."

Today, Dehnamaki's career path shows some similarities to that of a far more famous Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. As a young man, Makhmalbaf was also a member of an Islamic militia, obsessed with issues of social justice. But Makhmalbaf has distanced himself from that past and now lives mostly outside Iran. By comparison, Dehnamaki just seems to have taken a stylistic step away from his militia days—but even that step speaks volumes. "Someone who used insults and shouting to get his message across has now moved on to something more sophisticated," says Abu Taleb. "Someone who wanted to push his views by force is now using art. That's very important." And millions of Iranian youth, drawn in by the movies' homegrown appeal, are watching.

© 2009