To The Contrary

Coming up on To the Contrary.

A lot of comedy actually is about something painful.

It's a mix of comedy and drama.

We struggle but were living for those moments of joy, so we have to remember to create that for our families.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, the movie that won the 2023 Sundance Audience Award.

And the woman who wrote and directed it.

The Persian Version comes from Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz.

It's a mother and daughter story with generational cultural clashes.

The movie is loosely based on Maryam Keshavarz own life.

She's the only director to have won the Sundance Audience Award twice.

Welcome to the show, Maryam.

Thanks for having me.

So how are you doing?

How did it feel to win the award not for your first time, but your second time.

I was really shocked.

I was sitting all the way in the back of the theater when they called me because I just didn't think it was a possibility.

It's never happened before.

So I had to run down 100 flights of stairs.

It was very traumatic to to get there on time.

So tell us, what's it about?

The story is based on my life, and it's about a girl who grows up with actually eight brothers in one bathroom in New York City, and she's having some problems with her mom.

She's there fighting a lot.

And she's asked to come back home and take care of her grandmother because everyone's going to the hospital to be there for their dad who's having a heart transplant.

So while she's taking care of her grandmother, she's telling her grandmother the woes of her relationship with her mother.

And the grandmother says, you know, the reason your parents came to America is not what you think.

They were actually escaping a huge scandal.

So the film is in a comedic and dramatic way sometimes tracing the story of the scandal through the different generations.

And we look at the truth of the scandal through three different perspectives, through the three women, through Leila, who's the writer director played, is essentially my life.

The grandmother's version, and then the mother's version of the truth.

And and through it all, you get to discover so much about these women and what they've gone through and how trauma goes through different generations and how ultimately they're able to break it and create a beautiful relationship by ending that traumatic history From all the feedback you've received from viewers, not just Sundance, but whose version they like the best?

And whats different about that... We like you but your mom is so much cooler.

And I said, That's not right.

(Bonnie Laughing) That's true.

My mom is pretty amazing.

Everyone's always like, your mom, we always loved your mom.

But mad respect to her, what she's been through.

And for me too, you know, making the film, writing the film, I learned so much about myself, about my mother.

I it really helped my relationship with my mother to not only to think about it in an intellectual way, but to cast it and direct it and to visualize all the things my mom has gone through to the moment she came to America and all the struggles as an immigrant in this country, keeping a big family together during hard economic times, having to be innovative, then also becoming extremely successful.

Pull it.

Pull ourselves up by the bootstraps businesswoman.

You know, those are all things while having all these kids and a sick husband.

And I give her a lot of credit.

When I was making the film, she really did do all these things.

What did you learn about your mom when you cast her as a young woman first coming to America?

You know, I had discovered the secret in real life over 20 years ago.

So when I was (?)

to my mom in Iran, she got married when she was 13.

- I understood what that meant - 13?

thats amazing but it was at the time in the fifties that was very common.

Like if you take India, China, the Middle East, even some parts of the United States, a young marriage was a common thing unfortunately.

But, you know, of course, you hear the stories, Right.

But to think of and cast a girl who's actually 13, who is taken out of school, who just wants to finish high school and has always aspirations.

And to see her go through all of the things that she goes through until the moment she arrives in America, it disarmed me.

I was I had so much respect and so much empathy for my mother to see what she had gone through.

And even my own mom, she came to the rehearsals.

We shot the Iran sections in Turkey.

She's usually very outgoing, very loud, like me.

And she was so quiet in our dinner with the actress after the first day of rehearsal, I said, Mom, what's wrong?

You know, I never knew how young I was, know I was always struggling to survive.

And I see this young kid and that was me.

And just you gave her pause, you know, and it gave me pause.

My daughter's about to be 13 herself.

And to think all that, she could go through all this at such an age, you know, and survive and be successful and never be a victim and always find a way to have agency.

And to you know, to find the life that she wanted and not let other people tell her what her life should be.

I find that extremely inspirational as a woman.

What were your childhood grudges?

And I've got to imagine every kid everywhere has grudges against parents for, you know, a host of reasons.

What was interesting to me is growing up, I always felt, I have.

I'm it's so oppressive.

You know, my mom's so oppressive.

I have to do so many things because I'm a girl, you know?

And now I realize that, like she says in the movie, it's not because you're.

It's because you're a girl.

I can count on you.

I can't count on your brothers.

I count on you as like, a partner in crime, essentially.

And I never understood that growing up.

I was I just want to go play basketball.

I don't want to help.

I don't want to you know, I don't want to be your partner in crime.

I want, you know, so I realized, like, as I got older, that my mom depended on me because she trusted me and because she felt there's a special bond between mother and daughter in a way that she didn't feel with my brothers.

So, you know, I mean, so as a as a kid I didn't see that as a kid.

I just felt I was being treated differently.

And I didn't like it.

So I really rebelled against it.

I don't want to create any spoilers here, so only answer what you feel comfortable answering.

But your mom, what did she end up doing?

In what respect?

I mean, career wise, how did she.

yeah.

So like in the film, I mean, this part of it's completely true.

My dad was a doctor for low income people and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, he really believed in progressive social medicine for everybody.

But he had a heart attack at a very young age in his fifties.

And, you know, he is essentially was a freelancer.

So we didn't have insurance growing up.

If we got sick, we would go to my dad's friends.

If we were had a dental problem, we would go to the dental school and the students would work on us.

So when my dad gets sick, it's completely crushing to our family economically.

We are about to lose everything there.

They say that, you know, basically my dad has to sell his office to pay for the hospital bill and we're going to be on the streets if we don't find a way.

My mom has all these kids in New York City where you all are quite young and being a typist.

My mom didn't have any practical skills.

And, you know, a minimum wage job wouldn't cut it for all of us.

So in the story, you know, she looks up and she looks up for us.

She asks for a miracle and she looks up.

And this is how my mom describes it.

And she sees a billboard that is like 1-800 REALTOR and it says, make a lot of money.

And she's like, I need help.

Make a lot of money.

So she literally calls for a pay phone in those days with your phones and she asks how to do it in a very naive way.

And they say, you know, you just have to take these classes and you have to have a high school degree.

But, you know, my mom got married at 13.

She never finished high school in Iran.

So she goes to the classes and doesn't tell them that she doesn't have a high school degree.

And so she concurrently got her GED at the same time.

And she becomes super successful because she finds a hole in the market.

You know, we're immigrants and we came to this country for a better life, right?

Our dream is to own a home and be American.

And she realizes that's why every American immigrant comes here and immigrants arent being served by the real estate market specifically.

So she starts to focus on immigrants.

She starts to be very smart.

She knows, like a lot of immigrants, either they don't have the money or there's not a tradition of babysitting.

So she makes her office very kid friendly.

And she also found a way that was called the first time homebuyer.

I remember this as a kid.

I would always hear the first time homebuyers programs.

My mom researched the programs that they would help first time homebuyers, especially immigrants, to buy houses.

So she found that it would be cheaper for people to buy a house than to rent.

And, you know, so my mom is friends with a lot of these people because she changed their minds.

They went from renters to owning their home.

They started to have generational wealth.

That's how you get ahead as an immigrant.

Why with such a serious subject matter, did you inject humor and dancing and singing and all that kind of stuff that could, I guess, somehow detract from the seriousness of the message?

I don't think it detracts.

I think I use humor as a way to look at difficult moments in our lives.

I think I mean, there's a reason SNL is so popular, right?

It looks at really serious moments in American politics and history and kind of reflects on it.

And when I was wanting to do a film, you know, a lot of xenophobic rhetoric, there's been a lot of hatred circulating in our country over the last few years against each other unfortunately against immigrants Thought what a great way to create empathy and to create connection with people that are unknown to you, immigrants, than creating a comedy.

And I thought, Who's funnier than my crazy family you know I grew up with seven brothers and one bathroom.

That's a great comedy.

And how do you look at you know, you can look at moments of discrimination in the US and you can think of it in very dramatic terms, or you can reflect on it and find the funny moments as a way to underline what's happening in a different way.

I think with humor we can access so much more in a way because it lets us go that one extra step of reflection.

That's it's a reflection on something that makes us laugh really right on something real, usually something.

And a lot of comedy actually is about something painful.

So it's a mix of comedy and drama, But I certainly loved comedy as a way for people to connect with a family.

And I loved how even in the most difficult times in my family story, be it here in America, growing up in the eighties during hard economic times or back in Iran in the sixties, I just love how these families, especially women, created a sense of joy within difficult moments.

That's a testament to the human spirit and really why we live, right.

It's like we struggle.

We struggle, but we're living for those moments of joy.

So we have to remember to create that for our families.

And that's what the film does.

Now, tell me about you have been banned from returning to Iran.

I must be doing something right, But how how was it that young people got access to your movie?

-So my first... -You were banned , it was banned It's true.

My first film was called Circumstance and also one at Sundance.

And it's about a very liberal family living in Iran where one of the daughter falls in love with another girl.

So like the first really queer love story, lesbian love story in Iran.

And so we I'm banned.

How did they get it?

So that film was very successful and because it was the first to deal with sexuality and also it talked a lot about the youth underground movement, a lot of the things that you see now, like women, like freedom, they talked about progressive politics and kids try to make change through through art.

And so it became the biggest they found a way to black market.

When the DVD came out, they I guess someone smuggled it back because it became the biggest black Market DVD.

And then they started putting it.

I mean, it was everywhere, honestly.

Even my editor who edited this film, he's British, Iranian.

He said, I want to meet you, because when I was a college student, we all got your DVD and we found we all gathered in the dorm to watch it, you know, And it was such a big deal, it really struck a chord.

Like, I still get so many messages from kids in Iran about how important the film was, not just about queer identity, but about the youth underground and about the youth movement of trying to create change in Iran.

And yeah, so it was it's, you know, it got I mean, it's hard for me because my family, my grandparents lived in Iran and my grandmother passed away a few years ago and when she was sick, you know, she would call me on Facetime and say, why don't you visit me?

You don't love me.

And I would have to explain to her like, I can't come back.

You know, I couldn't be there while she was sick and I couldn't be there for her funeral.

And, you know, in the film, I'm so close to my grandmother.

So that was really it was really difficult for me.

So it spread on the black market, essentially.

Did you make money from that?

No but, you know, it's that's the downside of cultural movements.

You dont neccessarily make money,but we definitely didnt.

And but I think it was so exciting, right?

It's like you can really reach so many people.

I just still to this day, I find out in the people how they and how they watch.

It was so interesting, like they would make little screenings, like little mini theater screenings of the film.

And I find this out from people I mean, in Europe, like, you know, we had this we held this event of your film in Iran.

And I think that's that's the beauty of, you know, art and how across borders and, you know, like I used to smuggle Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson to Iran, there's like no borders to art.

People have this need for they have a need for it, and then they connect with it beyond anything that we can understand something so visceral.

So it's worth breaking the rules, but there are borders, unfortunately, to Islamic extremism.

What is your view of the government there?

I mean, it's so oppressive to the people, particularly to women, because women, of course, have always been the symbol for the Islamic regime.

They want them to cover their hair and be modest.

And it's incredible.

I mean, I've seen this.

This is not something that's born in a day.

Right?

You have the Nobel Prize winner, Nargis Mohammadi, the incredible feminist who's been in jail for years, her own children, teenagers she hasn't seen in ten years fighting against the status quo.

You have half the university is women.

You know, they all have Ph.Ds and M.D.

They're so high achieving even within these confines.

And of course, these are the same women creating the movement, the marching in the street.

They're demanding their rights.

I think no regime can keep people down.

And these women have proved that they won't be suppressed.

And there's still marching in the streets.

They're still walking with their hair uncovered.

They're still defying all of the rules.

Are they still but they still are allowing little girls to get educated?

Yeah, women are highly I mean, I think more than 50% of the university are women.

So there's no restriction of education.

But the restriction is how they dress in their hair and stuff.

So the women .....

But don't they don't the mullahs realize that once women get educated, they're not going to walk around.

-Exactly, thats the point.. -degree heat with black covering all over, you know, covering their full outfits underneath.

-And they're not ... -Thats the thing, theyve been pushing the boundaries since I was a teenager.

So now if you look at Google, Iranian women, they're wearing, you know, short pants.

They're wearing like, you know, Capri pants.

And they're showing most of their hair and they're wearing lots of makeup.

And they're they're slowly were pushing the boundaries, but now they just completely take off the headscarf.

They're like walking into the metro.

My my cousin was just there and he said, like half the women don't cover their hair.

Half the women, like, they cannot arrest half of the country.

That's the problem they're having.

It's a mass protest.

It's not ten people we're talking half the population is walking around with no head cover is how long we expect it to last.

I mean, how long can a government function when half the population is just walking around in protest like that?

It's incredible, right?

You know, that's that's the that's the million dollar question.

But I think what I find inspiring is so many people from young girls to my grandmother's age are in you know, in solidary with each other.

I think that's really it.

You see, it's not only young people, you know, it's across the board.

This is such a show of strength, you know, And I think also the difference is now we have international solidarity.

We have people you know, there's been protests around the world, people marching in Berlin, 80,000 people, 50,000 in the UK, like all over the world, people are raising their voices because it's not just the issue of Iran.

Women's rights are being trampled all over the world.

It's an international issue.

We certainly have that issue here in the United States.

You know, women's reproductive rights are being challenged.

So this kind of an idea that we have to stand up together internationally to protect our rights, there is a solidarity.

That's something that's I find very exciting that we realize our rights are kind of interconnected.

Do you believe that if women had power or were even, let's say, in charge in Iran, that the situation in the Middle East would be different?

And I don't just mean Hamas and Gaza and Israel.

I mean, honestly, my philosophy is I don't even think that's it's only a question of Iran in the Middle East.

I think more women should be in power across the board.

I think we have disempowered women to be representative of our rights around the world.

I mean, look at our own Congress.

How many people are what percentage of our Congress is women?

Have we ever had a female president?

I mean, other countries India has had a prime minister that's a woman.

- Other countries, Argentina -Back in the 1960s.

In Argentina, you have Chile, you have so many countries around the world, but never the United States.

This is really shocking to me that I raise a daughter here.

And she asked me all the time, do you think I could ever be president?

Why?

And she asked all the time, why are the no why has there ever been a female president?

And that's a really great question.

We are a symbol for other nations and we have to make that change here.

I mean, I try as much as I can, you know, when there's, you know, people raising money or people running and like to support as much as I can.

But, you know, when you talk about women, country leaders, you're actually speaking to the choir right here because we have on this program executive producer Cari Stein.

And I, 25 plus years ago started interviewing the Benazir Bhutto's, who was one of the most commanding intelligence women who ever existed.

I mean, she would walk into a room and suck all of the energy out of it because she was such an incredible, charismatic figure and she was head of her country.

I mean, she's was assassinated now, what, about a decade or more ago?

And she was prime minister of Pakistan probably two plus decades ago.

And back then, there weren't that many women leaders.

Now, so many countries have had women leaders.

And I remember going, yeah, exactly.

I remember going to these international conferences.

We went to the 94 conference in Cairo on population and development, which was really about women and reproductive rights.

And then we went to the Beijing conference in 95 on women and the US way back then was the world leader on women's rights, except second, maybe to the Nordic countries.

But since then, and it's really been depressing to watch us fall behind.

Look at Scandinavia, right?

And like, you know, you have so much progress there in terms of not just the heads of state, but also the country itself.

However, if you talk to the women there, because I have at the World Bank conferences I've attended in and U.N., they don't tell like they are equal yet.

But ironically But yet they're the most, you know, okay, maybe we should look at New Zealand.

Incredible.

And young women, too, you know.

So I think maybe that's it.

I think this generation also doesn't know barriers in the way that ours do.

So I think I'm hopeful.

I certainly see it in my daughter.

There is a sort of a not a rebelliousness, but there's an idea that they demand their place.

They don't have to prove themselves.

-They expect it.

- They expect it, exactly Its not an argument, it's done.

Yeah, exactly.

You were talking about Hollywood still being even after the MeToo movement, still being I've been told by people I know who work there that nothing really changed in terms of the casting couch, even though all of that publicity came out and Harvey Weinstein went to jail and so many people got prosecuted, Bill Cosby was disgraced because of his behavior finally.

And but Barbie, Barbie of all movies, a movie about a woman by women, the highest grossing film just about ever now.

Right.

Do you expect that will change behavior in Hollywood?

well, economics always helps, I think, because ultimately their goal is to make money.

So let's hope.

I mean, that's a film not just about Barbie, right?

It's like a feminist call to arms.

It's a very unusual take on our society.

And I think that's why it hit a chord and done very stylishly.

I hope so.

I think, you know, it's interesting, but that's a very independent director who went into the studio system.

So I think as more women work in the industry and create their own voice, like she had a very particular voice that you can see in all of her work, as we allow ourselves and we are supportive, we have a lot of the difference now is that we don't really see each other as threats to each other.

There is a more of a sense of community amongst women directors.

I had an issue yesterday with a production.

I pick up the phone and called a fellow female director who is senior than I who's had better, more experience, asked her, Is this normal?

Should I be taking this?

You know, and we have that community and I think we're creating our voices.

And, you know, you have someone like Greta Gerwig, who's really honed in her voice in an independent way and said that her voice is important.

And now that translates to something.

You have to create an environment where women believe that they can have a different voice and what the status quo is.

And that's just by women, like having a supportive, independent space for us to help each other and to grow.

I think that's and I think that is happening even even though it's a very small pot of people, We all do know each other.

- It's not a job That's the most insightful thing I've heard about what's happened to Hollywood.

On the positive side, since the MeToo movement.

On the positive side, since the MeToo movement.

And thank you for sharing that.

That's that's really important.

And that is something that will keep keep women going and give give them a something to say.

Look, we are in the midst of all this regression.

- We're still going forward.

- Absolutely.

And we have each other's backs.

Thank you so much.

Why don't you tell me just before we go, what's up next for you?

Do you know yet?

many things I am doing a romantic love story based on the woman who plays my mother in the film.

Niousha Noor wrote a gorgeous script.

And so it's about her first time falling in love.

So I am going to be directing that this spring - Its called (inaudible) - Best of Luck.

to you Thank you.

Thank you so much Maryam That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on.

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See you next week.

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