🔺Denial, Forgetting, and Slogans: The Government’s Ways of Fighting Independent Cinema

▪A young host of the internet program “Dialogue and Discourse,” titled “Fe?hihtagān Gapp,” tells Abbas Salehi, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, that there isn’t a day or a week when news about a “underground film or underground music” that has just been produced and released doesn’t reach their ears. Regarding underground music—and to indicate that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has not been able to prevent its release on a broader scale—at least two and a half decades is too late for this question. Even Mohsen Chavoshi, who because of the lyrics from these years—now along the path of the will and narrative of the ruling authorities—has been turned into a national hero by these gentlemen, released a large portion of his work from the beginning to the middle of the way underground and without a permit. The licensing system of the Islamic Republic, despite its insatiable appetite for patronizing, has for years accepted that in this era it cannot keep sound content—whether music, songs, or podcasts—in its absolute control. What it imagines about its control over cinema is something that will not happen.