But in a country where copyright is widely violated with regard to artistic works, that is a huge challenge. Producers have been urging Iranians to respect copyright and not buy pirated versions. It is also available from shops across the country on DVDs. Striking, too, is the fact that some of its characters, such as Bozorg-Agha, who is allied to the shah, are not depicted in an unambiguously negative way.Įach episode of Shahrzad is sold on a weekly basis on its website. Shahrzad is not solely critiquing Iran’s past politics, but also subtly highlighting beliefs and norms considered wrong and anachronistic that are nonetheless still present in Iranian lives.
WHEN RANIAN SERIAL SHAHRZAD SERIES SERIES
“These series made outside the state TV apparatus and produced privately are a new phenomenon.” “There are things that are absent from a state TV production, such as the displaying of music instruments or women singing, but you’ll see them in Shahrzad,” he said. Not all historical references in Shahrzad are accurate, says film critic Parviz Jahed, but “good storytelling has made it an intriguing and successful melodrama set against the backdrop of an important episode in Iran’s modern history”. Those scenes strike a chord in today’s Iran, in the light of more recent crackdowns against journalists and activists, especially after the 2009 post-election unrest. The series portrays the repression that took place at the hands of the shah’s forces, with journalists and intellectuals summoned, intimidated or jailed arbitrarily and newspaper licences revoked. The series portrays the crackdown that took place at the hands of the Shah’s forces. But the forced marriage does not separate the pair. Shahrzad, meanwhile, is forced to marry against her wishes and become the second wife of the son-in-law of Bozorg-Agha, a hugely influential Godfather-like figure who is close to the shah. Farhad, an ardent supporter of Mosaddeq, is jailed after the shah’s security forces close down his newspaper. Shahrzad, a medical student, and Farhad, a journalist, often meet at the Cafe Naderi, a hub for intellectuals in the city. It was a defining moment in Iran’s modern history, the reverberations of which are still felt today. That coup, engineered by the CIA and British intelligence to safeguard the west’s oil interests, consolidated the shah’s rule until the 1979 Islamic revolution. Photograph: Amirhossein Shojaee/Īnd out of a depiction of Iran under the late shah’s despotic rule comes a drama that draws many parallels to politics in the country today.ĭirected by Hasan Fathi and written jointly with playwright and university professor Naghmeh Samini, Shahrzad is the story of a love broken apart by events in the aftermath of the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq. In the TV drama, Shahrzad is forced to marry against her wishes.
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