Year: 2007
Directors: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Writer: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian, Gabrielle Lopes Benites
Running Time: 95 min.
Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl coming-of-age in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Marjane Satrapi, precocious and outspoken, grew up wearing sneakers and beating up boys. When she was ten years old, her world changed overnight. Girls and boys had to use different doors to enter the school. She had to cover herself with a long dark robe. Grownups around her began to disappear. It is through her eyes that we see a people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power, forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, Marjane outsmarts the “social guardiansâ€? and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, Marjane plots her escape to a better world.
Persepolis is an animated featured based on the autobiographical graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi. With French director Vincent Paronnaud, Satrapi recreates the painful story of her young life from the overthrow of the Shah regime to the continuing Iraq-Iran war. Over twenty traditional animators worked on the movie, painting every frame by hand in deep blacks and glorious white and producing over 80,000 drawings. When explaining why they did not choose computer animation, artist Satrapi explained that “the slight shaking of the hand makes a drawing human, and brings it alive.�
The critics seem to agree. Nick Schager of Slant magazine writes that the film “radiates brutal honestyâ€? and adds “Persepolis feels ripped straight from its creator’s heart, a sore, scathing, warts-and-all account of her formative years bolstered by its formidable aesthetic inventiveness, and elevated to the near-apex of its art form by its unguarded sincerity.â€?
