Contemporary Film: Under the Influence of Marjane Satrapi

Born in Rasht, Iran, Marjane Satrapi is internationally renowned for her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, which illustrates her traumatic childhood during the Islamic Iranian Revolution and her subsequent involuntary exile in Europe. In 2007, Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud presented the screen adaptation of this cult comic at the Cannes Festival. The film, faithful to the graphic novel’s spirit of political denunciation, became one of the greatest milestones in animation and even won an Oscar nomination in that category.

The cycle “Under the Influence of Marjane Satrapi” highlights the Iranian director’s contribution to contemporary animated film with a selection of four politically-charged feature films about armed conflicts and childhoods interrupted by exile, which portray the social reality and recent historical dramas of the country represented in each. The two fiction movies and two documentaries of this animation programme—which premiered at the festivals of Cannes and Berlin—tell four heart-rending biographical stories that took place in Ecuador, Colombia, Croatia, Iran and Palestine.