Lebanon’s General Security banned from theaters an Iranian film that focuses on the 2009 “Green Movement,” the director of the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon told The Daily Star over the weekend.
“Authorities banned it, yes ... because they considered it an offense to a [foreign] country,” Jocelyne Saab said, adding that she had suspected General Security would take such a decision.
“The Silent Majority Speaks” was released in 2010 and is a composite of historic developments in Iran including violent periods over the course of a century.
The film, by Bani Khoshnoudi, concentrated on Iran’s presidential election in 2009, when thousands of people took to the streets to protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. The demonstrators who were calling for reforms and demanding a recount clashed with security forces and some of the protests turned violent.
The film had been scheduled to be screened Saturday at 6 p.m. at the Metropolis Empire Sofil cinema in Beirut as part of the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon, but two hours before the screening General Security informed the organizers the film was banned.
General Security is viewed as close to Hezbollah, which is allied with Iran.
Describing the film as “intelligently done,” Saab said the ban contradicted the essence of the festival, which focused on cultural resistance, and insisted that the movie was not politicized.
In a statement released hours after the decision was issued, the organizers said the censorship authority deemed the film “an insult to a foreign country.”
The statement said the movie was a visual study of a centurylong political and popular struggle for democracy in Iran and was screened in other countries. “The festival would have liked the concerned censorship authorities to be able to support this work,” it said.
