Both the Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times offer up profiles of cartoonist and now filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, as her adaptation of Persepolis gears up to take America by storm. Here’s a choice quote from the first story:
Satrapi is a little defensive when I ask why she made the film in French.
“In which other language do you want me to do it? My producers are French, the money is French and the animators who work with us are French. How are they going to animate something they don’t understand?
“Also, it’s a universal story. The background is Iran, but this is about everybody: family, love, exile, adolescence. If America could make war in Iraq, it was because public opinion were so scared of Iraqis. They had been dehumanised. From the second you can identify with people, that’s much harder.”
Expect to see a lot more of these types of profiles in the coming weeks.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
She just answered a question. Why should she be “defensive”? No need to be…she produced a masterpiece of intercultural understanding. A masterpiece, which shames ultra fundamentalists like G.W.B and makes them cringe. No “Axis of Evil”, no appologies or condemnations. Just a story that shows, how people are and how they change and adapt to certain “historic” events.
“Persepolis” is not only an autibiographical story of one person ( although exeptional person )but the factual autobiography of a generation of people who went through the same trials an tribulations…as cultural outcasts, who assimilate, but hate their ability to assimilate so thoroughly…who feel guilty and lost…but still strive to assimilate more…and lose their ability to be genuinly the person they want to be…Marjane Satrapi conveys this feeling of being lost so accurately, it hurts…Americans have never lost their cultural idendity…why should they?…America never had one….America is too young to lose anything…the greatest cultural achievemnets of USA are Mickey Mouse and Superman…a mouse and an immigrant (which is cool.::-))…but America has no inate idea of history…and Iranians love America…and Americans would Iranians..
And Satrapi not only shows that…she kills political retorics like “Axis of Evil”…good WOMAN..by the way..:-)…She looks like Wonder Woman…:-)