Marjane Satrapi: "Persepolis"

My first step for developing the new project proposal is to analyse what most interest me in the projects that inspire me and from that I can form my aims for this project.

Lets start with Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, because it’s the project that most inspires me when I see the movie, read the book, read some interviews and even when I listen the soundtrack of the movie.

First of all, it inspired me to think: “I can do something too that can change peoples mind”

Aspects that I got interested:

• The fact that she is a person who left her country to lived in another country (I identified with).

• The way she tells about her experience in a very human way.

• Expression of political (or better: humanist) concern through art (graphic novel). It’s the same thing why I like Gabriel o Pensador: Political concern expressed through music.

• Expression of their own experience in their culture. Showing their culture “to others” by their point of view. “The book I wrote for the other ones, not for Iranians.” (Marjane Satrapi).

• The simple everyday life facts that make it near to the reader. I always like everyday life, simple and ordinary things because it is what makes our life anyway. In many small things is what makes the whole. Like Sérgio Godinho, a Portuguese poet and singer, wrote and Gabriel o Pensador sings in one of his songs: “life is made of small nothings” (“a vida é coisa de pequenos nadas”). Ordinary things make life. What is ordinary for ones can be different for others, what is interesting. And what is ordinary for both creates empathy.

I watched and read some interviews with Marjane, and I highlight some points:

“ The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.” “Nowadays they talk about the Christians and the Muslims as if all Christians were one person and all the Muslims were one person. There is nothing in common, for example, between me and a fanatic of my country. There is nothing in common between a liberal person here and the government of George Bush, yet they are both in the same country. But there are a lot of resemblances between the fanatics of my country and the government here. ”

• “We are never very convinced about the things we know, but we are much more convinced about things we know nothing about.” – in my opinion, this is the moment when we create stereotypes.

The goal of Persepolis was to make people identify with the main character and feel that she is just human being like themselves. Her human concerns are evident in all the interviews of Persepolis. “I’m doing a humanistic movie (…) I’m putting human beings in the centre of interest.”

The motive why Marjane made an illustration movie instead of live action is to make people relate to it:

“If we had done this movie in live-action, as soon as you put a live human being in a geographical place with certain type of people, etc, then again that will become people that are far from us, that we can’t relate to them, they are not like us. It is something very abstract in the drawing that anybody can relate to. That’s why in the background we didn’t make anything exotic. In the background it can be Iran, but it can be any big city anywhere.”

Links to some interviews:
http://culturepulp.typepad.com/culturepulp/2008/01/the-culturepulp.html
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_10_003261.php
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=aMwfzqEqVLk