FADA Film Screens Persepolis

Join us for ‘An Evening of War, Revolution, Family & Punk Rock.’

Date:    27 August 2015

Time:    18:00

Venue:  Auditorium

FADA Film and the FADA Gallery invite you to a screening of PERSEPOLIS.

 ‘You will never have seen anything quite like this. Magnificent.’

Based upon the graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is the biographical and often hilarious adventures of Marji. From a rebellious, heavy-metal loving tomboy experiencing the turmoil of adolescence during the tyrannical Iranian revolution, to teenage exile in Vienna, she discovers the benefits of freedom may be just as shocking as the repressive regime she was forced to leave behind. Returning to Iran as an alienated adult, Marji must decide where it is her heart and home must lie in this complex, insightful and touching storie. Persepolis is one of the most sublime animated feature films you’re ever likely to experience.

Persepolis Trailer:

Awards

• Jury Prize - 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
• The Bulgari Award for NBR Freedom of Expression - 2007 National Board of Review.
• Best Animated Feature - 2007 New York Film Critics Circle.
• Best Animation - 2007 Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
• Best Animated Feature - 2007 New York Film Critics Online.
• Best Foreign Film - 2007 New York Film Critics Online. 

About the author: Marjane Satrapi. 

Pen World Voices Festival: Marjane Satrapi on the Graphic Novel, Family History, and adventures in Cinema. By Paulina Reso.

As a twenty-something art student living in Paris, Marjane Satrapi considered a number of odd jobs before deciding to write graphic novels. For a brief time, she imagined herself as a private detective, then as a headhunter (the gun-toting kind), and finally as a furs saleswoman on the Champs-Élysées.

As a twenty-something art student living in Paris, Marjane Satrapi considered a number of odd jobs before deciding to write graphic novels. For a brief time, she imagined herself as a private detective, then as a headhunter (the gun-toting kind), and finally as a furs saleswoman on the Champs-Élysées.

Fortunately for comic fans and literature lovers, all were passing fancies, and soon the Iranian-born artist began work on her first graphic novel, Persepolis, a memoir set in the turbulent years of the Islamic Republic’s cultural revolution. While Satrapi, now 42, has remained a cartoonist for those years, she has since experimented with other mediums of expression, such as animated film and live-action cinema. As part of the PEN World Voices Festival series, “Literature and the Moving Image,” Satrapi discussed how she started with comics and advanced to film with Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s art director, in the Museum of Modern Art’s subterranean theatre. 

Satrapi, an Iranian living in Paris, and Mouly, a Frenchwoman living in New York, conversed comfortably on-stage, as if the audience had been invited into their living room to witness the reunion of old friends. Mouly began by reminiscing about their first meeting (they were in downtown Los Angeles, wandering the empty streets in search of a café where they could enjoy coffee and cigarettes) then moved to the preliminary question: “How did you get into graphic novels?”

For Satrapi, it all started with the work of one man, one genius: Art Spiegelman (image above) Growing up in Tehran, Satrapi had thought that comics were exclusively for children, but when she was given Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, for her 24th birthday, her attitude immediately changed. “It was the biggest revelation in my life,” said Satrapi, “It was stuck in my head because I’m someone who thinks with images; image is part of my narration as it is in graphic novels. In graphic novels, before you write, you draw.”

With her years of art school education, Satrapi began writing Persepolis, an autobiographical depiction of her childhood in Iran in the early eighties. By writing the book, she affirmed her identity in the face of a repressive government while shaping the West's view of Iran. “Suddenly we became terrorists. Our problems were only the veil, and the beard, and the nuclear weapon,” said Satrapi. “Nobody remembered that this country had the biggest poet of the world, and the philosophers, and 4,000 years of history. All of that [the book] was just to say, ‘Hey, we’re human beings.’”

The Veil in Persepolis. 

Cited The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project. Accessed August 20, 2015.

As Satrapi told Mouly, she did not expect Persepolis to become popular, or even be published. “When it was published, I thought 300 people might buy my book and say, 'We did something for this poor girl,'” Satrapi reflected with wry humor. 

Despite these expectations, the graphic novel became an instant success. When Satrapi was approached with the prospect of adapting it into a film, she resisted, making huge demands in the hopes that the project would be forgotten. But the film company agreed that it could be entirely hand-drawn animation in black-and-white. When the film was released in 2007 it garnered the Cannes Jury Prize and César Award for Best Debut.

For Satrapi, the nature of the stories required different mediums. Persepolis, as a highly political film, needed to be animated in Satrapi’s opinion. “People have lots of problems identifying with somebody who does not look like them exactly, but the abstraction of the drawing makes it possible that anybody can relate to a drawing; people can even relate to a mouse.” Cited Wild River Review, accessed August 20, 2015.

Marjane Satrapi Social Media Sites:

• Facebook
• Official Website – Steven Barclay Agency
• Twitter account