Very interesting. What do you think?
Certainly the weird story of the day.
Huh.
Wait so now the holocaust happened?
That was my first thought too. Talk about covering your bases…“We don’t believe the Holocaust actually happened, but if it did, then Iranians were right there to help the Jews escape.” :rolleyes: <— Ahmadinejad
Hey, good for them. Just because your leader is batshit crazy doesn’t mean all your art needs to suffer because of it. I’m shocked that the Iranian government okayed this, much less sponsored it, but it kind of gives me hope for the future.
The piece suggests that Ahmadinejad doesn’t have his fingers in every pie in the government, and that some elements in the government are trying to moderate or compensate for his craziness.
I guess if you wanted to be cynical about it (and I do, I do), you could say that the series does nothing more than show Iran as the good guys without explicitly saying the holocaust happened. I mean, they probably don’t have the protagonist saying, “Here’s your passport so you won’t be one of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis as part of a systematic program of genocide.”
Well, the closing title does say, “Thanks to the courage and selflessness of Habib, only 43,756 Jews were killed in Nazi-occupied Europe.” 
Ahmadinejad is a university-schooled, engineer-trained, post-grad with both advisorial and governal history. I wouldn’t put it past, above or below his to finger the game to garner a round support. Where his actual intentions lie, is hard to know, but since Israel is a dominant and strongly supported power in the Mid-East, he can’t afford to piss them off too much.
Further, this comes as a timely slap in France’s face, who’re currently hissing for increased aggression (in the form of sanctions or even war), considering his country helped French Jews escape the Nazis in the second world war. The timing is simply deliciously explicit.
Further, the dramatically western tendencies in the show (no bureh, no burka, not even a hijab - a fairly radical thing) engenders sympathies and hope in the western world for a middle-eastern country that might just swing into Western ways of thinking yet. (Considering Iran’s population isn’t very strongly muslim; truly a rule of a minority)
In fact, I have to concess that Ahmedinejad might just be a freaking genius. Slightly insane and unlikeable, from my perspective, but a genious nonetheless. It’ll be very, very interesting to read his biographies, when this time period is charted and explored.
Is Iran going to try to get this mini-series distributed in the West? I’ve seen Iranian movies available on DVD in the US so there must be a way around the trading restrictions. Also am I to understand that usually whenever an Iranian movie or TV show has Western characters or scenes set in a non-Islamic country all the women still have headscarves on? :eek: What about newscasts? Do Iranian TV news shows pixilate women’s hair like American shows pixilate genitalia and buttocks?
Iranian film-makers are developing an international reputation for excellence.
As I recall, they’re even branching out into animation.
And I suspect that anything that brings prestige to Iran is the “favored child”, to be spoiled & coddled.
Just think about the propaganda value of this as it relates to the Western World. The Iranian government may have O.K.ed this in order to position itself in a place where it can say “We’re not anti-semitic. We don’t have any problems with Jews. We do have problems with Israel as a nation, but not the Jews.”
If it weren’t for the smiley, I wouldn’t even think twice about believing this. So, uh, you were joking, right?
If I’m not mistaken, Iran has a long history of animation. I wouldn’t have known this – I’ve never seen a Middle Eastern-made cartoon – were it not that Gallery Lainzberg, which specializes in animation art, was selling a bunch of their cels. This was over 25 years ago.
Iran also has a long history of excellent film making. They are not developing it, masterpieces have been coming out of Iran for years.