BBC4 just screened Nahid Persson’s Prostitution Behind The Veil, which was nominated in 2005 for an Emmy award. It also one a Guldbagge in Sweden for best documentary in 2005, and. achieved honours at the Creteil International Women’s Films Festival.

Born in Iran in 1960, Nahid Persson fled the country over twenty years ago and now lives in Sweden where she has studied microbiology. She also founded a radio station there. In 1993 she began studies at Film-och TV Skolan, and received master class education from 2003-2004. (Danish Film Institute)

The film was excellent, if rather shocking. Persson has returned to Iran “make a documentary, but not this one.” In Iran, “she finds the divisions between the classes greater than ever, unemployment has skyrocketed and widespread disillusionment provides a lucrative market for an elderly man, Habib, who sells prophecies on the streets” using canaries to pluck random, written predictions from a box. Deciding to make a documentary about the fortune teller, while filming “she was both shocked and intrigued to discover” Habib shared “his accommodation with Minna and Fariba”, two female prostitutes who are both heroin addicts. As Persson explains, the two “women were happy that someone was interested in their plight”:

“We had a natural relation. We trusted each other,” Persson says. “They even asked me on several occasions to go with them when they were going to meet some of their regular customers, because they were from some police station. But I didn’t do it out of the fear that I had to film someone who wears the uniform of a pasdar [Iran’s Revolutionary Guard]. And it was also better for them that I didn’t do it.”

Both women had become drug addicts due to addicted husbands. Fariba was given it by her husband to treat her kidney pain, and slowly got addicted; eventually “her husband sends her into the street and tells her, ‘Go bring clients.’” According to the film, Fariba had two children, one of which she still had, but the other, a three month old baby, was sold off by her husband. Minna’s story was similar in that her husband was arrested for drug running and more, and she turned to prostitution when she ended up living on the street with her child. She claimed she had no idea of his crimes, but he did get her onto drugs, too. Both women are often forced to take their children with them as they seek clients.

The film reveals how Shia Islam law can be used to “legally” conduct prostitution:

Men in Iran can find a way to buy sex and still comply with Muslim law by way of “Sighe,” a temporary marriage legal in Shia Islam. A Sighe marriage can last from two hours up to 99 years. Both Minna and Fariba participate in this pseudo-marriage with many of their customers

The film is well made, and sympathetic to the characters, and reveals a hidden side to Iran, where an official Iranian report concluded in 2000 that “Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635% among high school students and the (growth) rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109%.” The film looks at some of the prime causes of this: unemployment and poverty, and the fact that contraceptives were banned after the Iranian Revolution which led, from 1970 to 1990, to an almost doubling of the population from 28.4 to 54.6 million people.

All in all the film is worth watching to try and gain a better understanding of the social issues Iran faces.

I’ve expanded a bit more on some of the themes I wrote about in my recent article, Israel’s Rational Prospect. You can read it here.

As Lebanon is bombed by Israel, I was shocked (but not surprised) to watch the BBC talk calmly on TV a few days ago - with computer generated graphics to demonstrate - how Israel was conducting war crimes (not said as such, obviously) by targetting Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, a mirror image of Hizbollah’s repeated war crimes against Israel in Haifa and elsewhere.

Israel have so far targetted: “highway bridges, residential buildings, and an electrical sub-station“; Beirut airport, “the fuel stores of the Jiyyeh power plant”; three factories producing household goods; “production facilities of at least five companies in key industrial sectors - including the country’s largest dairy farm, Liban Lait; a paper mill; a packaging firm and a pharmaceutical plant” that “will cripple the economy for decades to come”; churches; a hospital; apparent Hezbollah TV and radio stations; highways, and more. This mimics the usual Israeli strategy of collective punishment, as carried out in the recent Gaza attacks which “included the cutting off of water and power supplies, the destruction of bridges and damaged sanitation for local Palestinians.” As Amnesty International pointed out, “The wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure and property and the disproportionate restrictions imposed on civilians by Israeli forces amount to collective punishment on the entire population of the Gaza Strip, a violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits punishing protected persons for offences they have not committed.”
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Looks like using computer games to help hack social networks is becoming all the rage these days. Wired is reporting that an Iranian game “designed by schoolchildren belonging to the Union of Islamic Student Societies” is to be released next year:

Rugged veteran Iranian special forces hero “Commander Bahman” will soon be tackling one of his toughest missions, rescuing one of his country’s top atomic scientists captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. […] The Fars news agency said that in the game’s narrative Iranian atomic scientist “Doctor Kousha” goes on a pilgrimage to the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Kerbala in Iraq where he is seized by U.S. troops.

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