Documentary producer Gillian Greenfeld and award-winning filmmaker Hossein Fazeli appealed to members of Vancouver's Jewish and Persian communities earlier this month at the first private screening to fundraise for the making of Women on the Front Line, a film about the history of the Iranian women's civil rights movement to date.
Audience members were shown a five-minute trailer, which gave an overview of what the final 90-minute documentary will cover, once fully funded. Slated for completion in 2011, Greenfeld and Fazeli are trying to raise enough money to begin shooting in March 2010. The hope is that, after screening at the Venice, Sundance and Cannes film festivals, the documentary will gain the attention of major international broadcasters.
The film's aim is to bring Iran into the limelight on the global stage and to encourage its move toward democracy. Fazeli will interview nine Iranian subjects, seven women and two men who are either for or against women's rights. The target audience is Iranian youth who have grown up under the Islamic regime and "socially conscious citizens of the West," Fazeli said. According to United Nations statistics, Iran has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
Greenfeld's history with Fazeli began in 2008, when she worked on an environmental film called Towards a Healthier Planet. She studied film at Simon Fraser University and Langara College, as well as at FAMU in Prague, before embarking on her own filmmaking project to discover her Moldovan roots.
Alongside this project, Greenfeld is cutting her own documentary shorts and assisting Fazeli, so as to learn the ropes of producing her own full-length feature. "This is an issue that is really important to me, so I feel really lucky to be a part of this," she said.
Fazeli is an award-winning director who first delved into gender inequality issues in his 2007 film, The Tale of Two Nazanins, about 17-year-old Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, who was sentenced to death in Iran for stabbing the men who tried to rape her. She was eventually freed through the efforts of Miss Canada 2003, Nazanin Afshin-Jam. Fazeli has made films for the United Nations, CNN, SBS, ARTE and Canal +.
The budget for Women on the Front Line is $330,000, enough to cover a one-year production schedule but excluding pay for the production team. Greenfeld and Fazeli will both have to juggle other commercial projects to make money during the process. In an ideal world, the budget would be one million dollars, Fazeli said.
So far, fundraising has been a challenge. According to Fazeli, the British Broadcasting Corp. offered $500,000 to produce the film but he is afraid of losing creative control of the content and doesn't want to "sell out." Greenfeld and Fazeli approached the National Film Board of Canada, but were told it was currently funding three other films about women's issues.
To date, the pair has raised $110,000 from an undisclosed human rights organization and a private donor from the United States. The Vancouver fundraiser garnered $2,000. No one in the Vancouver Persian community has offered to help fund the film. Greenfeld attributes the reason to fear. "I can see the point that the fear – people from that country wouldn't want to go back and revisit stories because they left that country."
Greenfeld said that approaching the Jewish community has achieved a number of things: "It's uniting that struggle together: universal feminism, if you want to call it that. Secondly, it is kind of dealing with issues in the Middle East, but in Canada. It's bridging cultures, I think, peacefully."
Iran has the largest community of Jewish people outside of Israel in the Middle East, but Fazeli said that, since the revolution in 1979, religious minorities have been under pressure and many have emigrated.
The women's movement is the largest, nonviolent civil rights movement in the Middle East and is backed by as many as five million people in Iran, enough power to change the socio-political landscape of the country, Fazeli said. "It is a sad fact that no one has paid attention to this issue," he said. Iran is known abroad as what he called "the headache of the international community." Solving the country's myriad political problems needs to happen from within its own borders because the Western world is "afraid to tinker with it," he added.
But where women's rights are concerned, the issue is a worldwide problem, Fazeli said, citing salary differentiation, violence against women and incest statistics that are still very apparent even in the West. "Women aren't really free anywhere," he said. "When you're talking about women's issues, you're talking to all women," he said, adding that, "When women aren't free, men aren't either."
Jeanie Keogh is a freelance writer living in Vancouver.