CANNES,
France — Iranian Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who lives in
exile following a smear campaign about her love life, wept with joy as she won
the best actress award at the
Cannes Film Festival on Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
Ebrahimi, 41, won for “Holy Spider”, in which she
plays a journalist trying to solve the serial murders of prostitutes in the
holy city of Mashhad.
“I have come a long way to be on this stage tonight.
It was not an easy story,” she told the audience at the awards ceremony.
She said she had been “saved by cinema”.
“It was humiliation but there was cinema, it was
solitude but there was cinema, it was darkness but there was cinema. Now I’m
standing in front of you on a night of joy.”
“Holy Spider”, directed by Danish-Iranian Ali
Abbasi, is inspired by the true story of a working-class man who killed
prostitutes in the early 2000s and became known as the “Spider Killer”.
Abbasi was denied permission to film in Iran and it
was ultimately shot in Jordan.
Ebrahimi became a star in Iran in her early twenties
for her supporting role in one of its longest-running soap operas, “Nargess”.
But her life and career fell apart shortly after the
show ended, when a sex tape was leaked online in 2006 which, it was claimed,
featured her.
‘About women’
Ebrahimi’s character in
“
Holy Spider” has also been a victim of lascivious rumors and male predation.
The film suggests there was little official pressure
to catch the murderer, who ends up a hero among the religious right.
They wanted to delete me from everywhere, remove me from cinema. Maybe to (commit) suicide, to die. But in the end I’m here with this award,
“This film is about women, it’s about their bodies,
it’s a movie full of faces, hair, hands, feet, breasts, sex — everything that
is impossible to show in
Iran,” Ebrahimi said.
Abbasi insisted the film should not be seen as
controversial.
“Everything shown here is part of people’s everyday
life. There is enough evidence that people in Iran have sex, too. There’s ample
evidence of prostitution in every city of Iran,” he told reporters.
Ebrahimi grew up in Tehran where she went to drama
school, making her first film at 18, and quickly became known for playing wise
and morally upstanding characters.
‘I still love Iran’
In 2006, Iranian
investigators began probing a video widely distributed on the black market that
purported to show the young soap star making love to her boyfriend.
The leak’s author, facing arrest, fled the country.
Ebrahimi said at the time that she was the victim of an “immoral campaign”. The
case became so high-profile that Tehran’s chief prosecutor handled it
personally.
“They wanted to delete me from everywhere, remove me
from cinema. Maybe to (commit) suicide, to die. But in the end I’m here with
this award,” she said at a post-award news conference.
Ebrahami then moved to
Paris, speaking no French,
and kept afloat with odd jobs.
“I knew nothing about the film industry in France,”
she told daily Le Monde. “There was nobody to help me. It took me two or three
years to figure out where I had landed.”
At the awards ceremony, she thanked France, calling
her adopted homeland “exotic, paradoxical — happy but loves to be unhappy”.
But she added: “I still love Iran. It’s my beloved
country, my first country and I love all those Iranian people — even all those
who destroyed my life.”
“Holy Spider” drew several strong reviews in Cannes,
with The Hollywood Reporter saying it was “equal parts gripping and disturbing,
and not always for the squeamish”.
The Guardian called the movie a “strangely fictionalized
account”, but added that “Abbasi undoubtedly conveys the brutal attitudes which
create victimhood”.
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