What do Tehran and Tripoli have in common?
1) They both begin with ”T”. (Right.)
2) Er … they’re both capital cities of Arab dictatorships, respectively Iran and Libya, situated somewhere in the Middle East. (Er … right and wrong. Iran is on the edge of the Middle East, Libya is in North Africa. Neither one is particularly Arab, and it depends what you mean by ”dictatorship”.)
3) They both scare the living daylights out of George W Bush, but the idea of attacking them like he attacked Iraq scares him more, because they both have seriously well-stocked, trained and motivated militaries. (Right.)
4) They both have a whole bunch of oil. (Right.)
5) Both countries are seriously Muslim. (Right.)
6) And because of the above, they both treat women with shocking disdain, slam them in chador and generally regard them as lesser mortals. (Er … well, let’s examine this.)
Thanks to the Three Continental Film Festival two documentary films give us a rare look beneath the chador that has generally kept these cities and the people who live in them hidden from our curious, Hollywood-besotted eyes.
Prostitution Behind the Veil takes a close-up look at what Tehran has become since the fall of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran, and the advent of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors in his wake. Beauty Will Save the World takes us into Tripoli — lair of the elusive, mysterious and demonised Colonel Moammar Gadaffi — The Great Leader and Great Survivor.
Both films focus, in very different ways, on the position of women in these two radical, and radically different, Muslim countries. And in doing so, both give us an astonishing picture of two worlds we think we know from one-sided reports in the international media — Iran where they chop off people’s heads for committing adultery, and Libya where The Leader has supposedly ruled his people with a wicked, iron fist since he overthrew the feudal monarchy in 1967, and spends his spare time plotting terrorist acts against the West from a Bedouin tent deep in the Sahara desert.
The picture from Tehran is devastating — crumbling buildings leaning dangerously into crumbling roads, a sense of poverty and desperation all round. The Shah ruled over an iniquitous society that shamelessly favoured a corrupt elite who hung out in the once-perfumed streets of the city, living the life of starlets and society millionaires on the French Riviera, while the people on the outskirts of town and in the hinterland lived in poverty, fear and despair.
The Ayatollah and his mob kicked out the rich. But they don’t seem to have kicked any of the rich spoils of the country into the mouths of the general population — the impression, as in so many Third World revolutions gone awry, is of even greater poverty, desperation and hopelessness.
What you don’t expect is that this hopelessness breaks out in social ills that would emerge in any society forced to the edge — crime, drug addiction and ordinary women resorting to prostitution to feed the habit.
It is the kind of picture that makes you ashamed to be part of the male species — guys stopping their cars to pick up women (some dragging their children along because there’s no one else to look after them) on the side of a busy road, using them and then cheating them of what had been promised. The film does not offer any solutions. It just tells you the story.
Tripoli is a different kettle of fish. The city looks modern, clean and organised, its population, by contrast with that of Tehran, relaxed, well fed and self-confident.
Even the use of the veil is different. ”The men make us wear these veils,” says one woman to a cocksure Western journalist. But where the Iranian veil shrouds its wearer like a tired, scavenging fly, the Libyan veil is a gaudy, colourful affair. ”Just part of our culture,” the woman says. You could be somewhere in Africa. In fact, you are.
Beauty Will Save the World is about a bizarre, Internet beauty pageant whose finals the organisers have decided to stage in Tripoli –”We will get more attention,” they say.
There seems to be an inherent contradiction going on here. Attention in what is seemingly one of the most closed societies on the planet?
But, of course, they turn out to be right.
The contestants arrive from all over the place in luxury jets that have probably been provided by The Leader himself. He has, after all, given his blessing to this unlikely event being staged in his country. The only condition is that there should be no bikini parade. The giggling gaggle of beauties, from Morocco, West and Eastern Europe, and the US of A, must remain decently covered. Otherwise, everything is cool.
The apprehension of the contestants, having resisted the pleas of parents and boyfriends back home not to go because they will be kidnapped and sold into slavery, evaporates as they come face to face first with the friendliness of the people and the mysterious beauty of their desert country; and finally, after several aborted attempts, with The Leader himself — the picture of charm, rugged good looks and laid-back authority.
Gadaffi has always been a master at manipulating the hysteria of the West to his own advantage. Here, he has the beauties of the world swooning at his feet, eating out of his hand.
And then he gracefully retires from centre stage and lets them get on with the synthetic crap of the catwalk.
The girls fly out of Tripoli transformed. Far from being forced into the veil, as they would have been in Tehran, they have had the scales lifted from their eyes.
For a brief moment, they have been made to feel that their fleeting beauty fits in perfectly with The Leader’s mission to bring greater harmony into an unjust and jealous world.