An interview with director and screenwriter Ali Abbasi, member of the international jury at the 21st Marrakech IFF

FRED Film Radio - English Channel

A very interesting conversation with Danish-Iranian director and scriptwriter Ali Abbasi, who is a member of the international jury who will bestow the Golden Star of the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival.

The author of “Shelley” (2016), “Border” (2018, Un Certain Regard Award for Best Film), “Holy Spider” (2022, Best Actress in Cannes for Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and more recently the Cannes-premiered “The Apprentice” (2024), a keen analyst of the concept of monstruosity who has faced bans left and right with his latest films, regrets that debate about his work as a filmmaker is always brought to a political territory, and its interpretation limited by limited perceptions.

Abbasi evokes his experience with “Holy Spider” (on an ordinary Iranian citizen turned serial killer attacking prostitutes) and “The Apprentice” (on the ascent of a young Donald Trump), talks at length about censorship and perception, mentions the role of streamers in recent evolutions in that respect, as well as the necessity for a filmmaker to be impolite.

On the reception of “The Apprentice” in the United States: “I am disappointed and shocked, and I have been since we came out in Cannes, by the reception in the US – that the film is being considered controversial. I mean, Donald Trump is the encyclopedia entry of ‘controversial’ – I don’t know what’s controversial about the movie. But in a way, it also shows you the limits of a certain kind of market economy, a capitalist market… The market actually is a very efficient way of censoring itself.“

On “strong men” and their rule: “The one good thing about growing up in Iran is that you get a very good bullshit detector, and I can smell a ‘strong man’ from miles away, and Donald Trump is a ‘strong man’. And the tactics of a strong man is always the same: it’s always manipulating the media, trying to model the reality and truth to the point where you don’t know what’s true and what’s not, having henchmen, psychics or whatever… As dramatic and simple as it is in ‘The Apprentice’, I think whatever Roy is teaching Donald is pretty effective in reality. It might not sound like it, but if you follow Khomeini’s rule in Iran, it’s not very different… I don’t want to make everything relative, because yes, there is a difference between the United States and Iran, absolutely […], but I definitely feel they [people in the US] should be worried.”

On streamers and being non-controversial sadly becoming a virtue: “Now, at the age of streaming, there is an added layer of censorship, I think, in the way they do the first filtering of all that. […] Now the virtue of not censoring is not a virtue anymore, it’s almost seen as an elitist thing – you get told ‘Why do you insist on showing some things that bother people?!’ –, and I think that we have gone from being the counterculture to being asshole elitists who don’t want people to have fun.”

On perception: “When we premiered ‘Holy Spider’ in Cannes, the first week, we were misogynists who loved to see women suffer and being tortured, and then incidentally, the Women, Life, Freedom movement started and suddenly, people were talking to me about the movement as if I was representing the movement. The movie was the same!”

About meeting fellow-exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof in Marrakech and his latest film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”: “It’s funny because in the festival, we’ve had so many movies that play on the same theme, which I don’t think is a coincidence, the theme being suppression of oppression… It’s very interesting: we’ve seen the Argentinian version of it, the Moroccan version of it […], and I think Mohammad masterfully did that! It is also very interesting that he can have empathy for the people who put him in jail and have been making his life very, very difficult. I think that’s a very courageous thing to do.“

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