6 Mar 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States
As the Oscars season came to a close this weekend, all eyes were once again on Hollywood. The prestigious awards ceremony, which took place on Sunday in Los Angeles, played host to some of the biggest names in cinema, all of whom were hoping to secure one of the infamous golden statuettes afforded to the year’s biggest on-screen successes.
This year, many awards were given to Index-worthy films and documentaries, as they bravely called out human rights and free speech abuses.
No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration investigating how Palestinian activists are protecting their communities from destruction by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, won best documentary. Another short feature from Iran, In the Shadow of the Cypress, won best animated short film, with the directors using their acceptance speech to speak out for their “fellow Iranians who are suffering”.
Meanwhile, Adrien Brody won best actor for playing the lead role in The Brutalist, a postwar film documenting the life of the fictional László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and esteemed architect. The Brazilian film I’m Still Here also won best international film, and is based on the true story of the lawyer and activist Eunice Paiva, whose husband was “disappeared” and murdered in the 1970s.
Clearly, there was much to celebrate from this year’s awards. However, beneath the glitz and glamour lies the much murkier issue of the close relationship between Hollywood and the US government.
When imagining a film produced in collaboration with the US Department of Defence (DoD), most would presumably envision a recruitment video for the armed forces, or another form of military propaganda. In reality, it’s likely that many people have already seen a film that has been vetted and approved by the DoD without even realising.
Have you watched Top Gun, Apollo 13 or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? What about Transformers, Armageddon or I Am Legend? If so, you’ve seen a film from the US military-entertainment complex. From James Bond classics like Goldfinger to modern Marvel creations like Iron Man, the DoD have had a hand in countless Hollywood productions over the years.
This is no conspiracy theory. In fact, the DoD’s own website boasts of its “long-standing relationship” with Hollywood filmmakers, in which they state that their two-fold goal is “to accurately depict military stories and make sure sensitive information isn’t disclosed”.
Despite this transparency, the fact that a department of the federal government influences the stories that are told by the oldest and biggest film industry in the world raises valid questions concerning censorship and free speech in cinema.
Roger Stahl, a professor, writer and film director who has spearheaded research on the US military-entertainment complex for the last 20 years, spoke to Index last year, around the time that Index on Censorship featured a special print edition on censorship in cinema.
He said that, although it is less direct, the DoD has historically engaged in censorship by vetting Hollywood productions.
“When filmmakers come to the DoD, they routinely express how great they think the film is going to be for military PR [public relations]. That is, they are trying hard to sell the script to the DoD right off the bat,” he said. “Then later there are the actual DoD requests for script changes, which almost never encounter resistance.”
“None of this process really qualifies as censorship in the traditional sense of a government entity enforcing its will under the threat of legal consequences,” he added. “The outcome is much the same, though.”
Stahl has explained in previous research how the process of Hollywood filmmakers collaborating with the Pentagon works: if a production company approaches the DoD to ask for their help with or endorsement for a movie, the Entertainment Liaison Office will request to see the script. If the script is at odds with military interests, it will be denied. However, if they decide the script is compatible enough to work with, they sometimes request changes to be made.
The logical outcome of this is that a lot of Hollywood films tend to show the military in a good light as filmmakers look to garner favour with them. The assistance of the armed forces in a film can be crucial in terms of obtaining much-needed personnel and equipment and the Pentagon would be less willing to offer help to those seeking to portray them negatively.
This is described by Debra Ramsay, a lecturer in Film Studies at Exeter University, as being “a question of negotiated influence rather than outright censorship or control”.
The DoD has stated: “While Hollywood is paid to tell a compelling story that will make money, the DoD is looking to tell an accurate story.” This is a rather generous sentiment which suggests that the changes they request are to do with correcting the use of military language and equipment to ensure it is accurately portrayed. However, Ramsay calls the focus on the term accuracy a “minefield”.
“Accuracy is also often about which narratives institutions like the DoD choose to invest in and which they don’t,” she told Index last year. “The DoD of course are concerned with questions of accuracy, and of course they have a vested interest in showing the armed forces favourably.”
Stahl contends that this interference from the US military – who will of course have their own agenda – in filmmaking amounts to military propaganda “with qualifications”.
“Propaganda is a term with a lot of baggage – it has associations with government-produced material with an overt political message designed to influence civilian populations. Products that arise from the Pentagon-Hollywood collaboration do not fit perfectly into this definition,” he explained.
“In my view, though, I have no problem calling this one of the biggest peacetime propaganda operations in our nation’s history,” he added.
However, Ramsay points out that the producers are not forced to change the script and that it is “up to the filmmakers” to decide how far they will allow the relationship with the DoD to go. She gives the example of the film producer Darryl Zanuck, who was cooperating with the US military when producing his 1962 film The Longest Day, and refused the request to cut a scene where two members of the US army shoot two German soldiers who have surrendered.
“The military could not control whether or not that scene made the final cut,” she said.
This demonstrates the grey areas that surround this issue, as the Pentagon is not actually stopping anti-military films from being made, but is rather indirectly incentivising pro-military films. However, this undoubtedly can lead to self-censorship, which is still a genuine issue – particularly when concerning the world’s biggest film industry.
Stahl has attempted to raise awareness of the extent of the relationship between the DoD and Hollywood, as he and his small team of researchers have utilised Freedom of Information requests to find that the Pentagon and the CIA have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows. Stahl says that although the fact that the Pentagon works with Hollywood and has an Entertainment Media Office is public knowledge, we don’t know the extent of this collaboration, which is a concern.
“The Entertainment Office does [media] interviews, they’ll admit to working with films, and even to making the military look good,” he told Index. “But they have been extremely guarded about the details.
“You could read a dozen press accounts, and no one could tell you how many productions were subject to official script oversight.”
It is difficult to measure the extent to which the military-entertainment complex influences how the US armed forces are actually perceived. Stahl points to audience effect studies being “few and far between”, while Ramsay suggests that it is a “difficult thing to quantify”.
“As an academic, I’d be wary of suggesting that these films influence people or change their perception – I’d want to see evidence of that – but they certainly appear to nudge people in a particular direction,” said Ramsay. “There is no clear-cut answer here, but I think the relationship definitely needs scrutiny and publicity.”
However, any amount of censorship is too much. The objectives and agenda of the DoD cannot be placed above a filmmaker’s right to freedom of expression. At last weekend’s Oscars ceremony, filmmakers were rewarded for the stories they have shown us on the screen, many of which gave a space to vital yet unheard voices; we mustn’t forget those stories that aren’t allowed to be told.
To read more like this, check out the cinema-themed issue of our quarterly magazine from July 2024. For further issues, you can subscribe to the magazine here.
19 Feb 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Israeli authorities are silencing Palestinian culture and history in a censorship surge that could soon include left-wing Jewish opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, academics have said.
Last week, Israeli police raided the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, one of the most prominent Palestinian cultural institutions in the occupied territory. Two of its owners, Mahmoud Muna and Ahmad Muna, were arrested on suspicion of “disturbing the public order”, interrogated, detained for 48 hours, then placed under house arrest for five days.
“I assume the next stage will be the Israeli left,” Menachem Klein, an Israeli political scientist and emeritus professor at Bar Ilan University, told Index after this event. “We are on the way to an authoritarian regime during ongoing wartime and it is easy to use emergency rules to silence freedom of expression.”
During the raid, detectives allegedly inspected books using Google Translate and took away ones they deemed to be possible incitement to terrorism because they contained words such as “Palestine” or “Hamas”.
One of the books presented as proof of possible incitement was a children’s colouring book titled From the River to the Sea, which was allegedly found in the store’s warehouse. The phrase, which has proved controversial, is used by some to imply that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Critics have labelled this confiscation laughable – in a comment piece, Haaretz ridiculed that a children’s colouring book is being “considered a ticking time bomb”. But government supporters have said that the book does constitute incitement.
There has so far been no criticism of the raid from any major Israeli opposition leaders, but a member of the Knesset (MK) for the left-wing Democrats party has allegedly filed a query in parliament questioning the police’s actions. Prominent Israeli authors and cultural personalities have also spoken out about it. However, the absence of broader political opposition means the authorities are unlikely to be deterred in the future from widening their targets on cultural institutions.
“We’ve undergone a change in Israel whereby anyone who incites to terrorism has to pay a price regardless of whether he is Arab or Jewish,” said Shamai Glick, head of the right-wing organisation B’tsalmo, told Index. He argues that authorities did not go far enough and should close the bookstores.
This recent intimidation comes amid crackdowns on Israeli films that are critical of the government, especially those dealing with alleged crimes related to the mass displacement of Palestinians during what Israelis term the 1948 War of Independence and Palestinians term the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
In December, Israel’s Minister for Culture and Sport Miki Zohar threatened to halt government funding for the Tel Aviv Cinematheque after it showed films deemed to be pro-Palestine at Solidarity Human Rights Film Festival 2024.
One of these films was the previously-censored Lyd, which depicts the 1948 expulsion of that town’s Palestinians and imagines what Lyd would be like if not for the Nakba. Two months prior, the police had banned a screening of Lyd in Jaffa after Zohar said the movie was “inciting and mendacious” and “slanders Israel and Israeli soldiers”.
Cutting government funding to a cultural institution in Israel is a death sentence, as there is little private investment in the arts. In a letter to the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, Zohar wrote that the Solidarity Festival had shown films that “are against the state of Israel” and which “disparage the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force[s]”, according to the Jewish Independent. Smotrich has set up a committee to determine whether the festival violated funding laws.
Lyd co-director Rami Younis said the recent raid on the bookstore should be seen as an escalation of national cultural censorship. “This is another syndrome of the rise of fascism. Are books the enemy? We’ve seen regimes in the past that declared books and songs the enemy. And they’re all dark regimes and this is where Israel is heading.”
“If it’s not stopped, it will get much worse very soon,” he said.
The government has also started deploying a little-used British Mandate-era law dating back to 1917, which allows the Culture and Sport Ministry to review films before they are shown at cinematheques, thereby stopping screenings of contentious films.
According to Haaretz, the Israeli Culture and Sport Ministry’s Film Review Council warned cinematheques in November not to screen filmmaker Neta Shoshani’s documentary film 1948: Remember, Remember Not, as it had not been granted the council’s approval. The film, compelling and thought-provoking, looks at the War of Independence / Nakba through testimonies and interviews with Israelis and Palestinians. The film lost several screenings as a result, but ultimately was approved by the council.
In response to the request, cinema directors said they had not been asked to clear films with the council previously. Normally, the council sets age ratings rather than undertaking political censorship.
Filmmakers and festival organisers in Israel are now being deterred from showcasing work that is critical of the government. The coalition’s threatening behaviour towards art and culture that raise questions about Israel’s foundation, probe Palestinian displacement or allege violations by the Israel Defense Forces mean that many cultural workers are steering away from controversial topics.
“When they threaten, you don’t feel like taking a chance,” Shoshani recently told The Jewish Independent. “There is a chilling effect,” she said.
“This means that culture in Israel is rapidly becoming non-critical and doesn’t go to [controversial] places simply because there is no one to fund this type of film. If I enter controversial realms, I won’t get funding and at the end of the day, we all have to make a living. So clearly people exercise self-censorship even though they don’t admit it.”
“This is something that happens under every dictatorial regime,” Shoshani added. “In a fascist regime, culture becomes propaganda and not culture. Gradually, Israeli culture is becoming like that.”
In response to criticism that the Israeli government is impinging on free expression, Zohar’s office said: “We will continue to defend freedom of expression but we won’t let extremist and delusional elements incite and harm under the sponsorship of the state of Israel.”
The censorship of Shoshani’s film also demonstrates how the Israeli state is attempting to stop the public from seeing archival footage and important documentation produced by researchers. The public broadcaster Kan (also known as the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation), which funded the film, has not aired it for more than a year, due to what it describes as wartime sensitivities. “It will be screened soon,” a spokesperson said. Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi has allegedly pressed Kan to scrap the film entirely, according to Israeli news website ICE (Information, Communication, Entertainment).
But Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian who appears in Shoshani’s film and who was born in 1948 himself, told Index that it is the government that is distorting and covering up the real events of the War of Independence.
Cultural censorship is also only the beginning of a wave of restrictions on free expression in Israel. The coalition government is currently pushing through other anti-democratic bills, including one designed to restrict the speech of academics, and another that would effectively reduce the ability of Palestinian citizens of Israel to vote in elections and decrease their Knesset representation.
“Yes, there is a government effort to censor and lie about 1948, about Israeli war crimes in that war and hence influence how Israelis see their history,” said Morris. “Along with other subversions by the government of Israeli democratic norms, they are threatening Israel’s culture and historiography and trying to replace truth with propaganda.”
20 Sep 2024 | News and features, Ukraine, United Kingdom
It was a genuine privilege to co-host the UK premiere of the film From Babyn Yar to Freedom this week in collaboration with the theatre company Dash Arts. Made by Ukrainian director Oleg Chorny in 2017, the film tells the life story of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov and his mission to bring the world’s attention to the full horror of the Babyn Yar massacre of September 1941. Kuznetsov defected to the UK in 1969 with the smuggled, uncensored text of his masterpiece, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.
Babyn Yar was a ravine in Kyiv that witnessed the “Holocaust by bullets” of 100,000 predominantly Jewish people. However, before the publication of Kuznetsov’s book in the West, the Moscow authorities had insisted on the essentially Soviet-Ukrainian identity of the victims.
The private screening of the film was made possible by the Jewish Community centre, JW3, which hosted the invitation-only premiere. The remarkable film traces Kuznetsov’s life in Kyiv and London by talking to those who knew him, including his son Olexiy, whom the writer left behind in the Soviet Union when he fled to the West.
Unfortunately, it has not been possible to release the film more widely because of a dispute over footage from a 1969 interview with Kuznetsov by CBS News journalist Morley Safer. Index and Dash hope publicity around the screening will held break the deadlock over the rights to the interview.
The screening was followed by a discussion led by Josephine Burton, the artistic director of Dash Arts, who used Kuznetsov’s words in the 2021 production Songs for Babyn Yar. Burton has been a tireless advocate for the film and contacted me after I launched a fundraiser for Kuznetsov’s unmarked grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Director Oleg Chorny and assistant producer Natalia Klymchuk fielded questions from the audience over video link from Kyiv.
Several mysteries still surround the story of Kuznetsov. Was he right to suspect he was being targeted by the KGB in London? Was his death from a heart attack at 49 in 1979 suspicious? And why does his surviving daughter not want his grave marked?
Index will follow up on suggestions from audience members about the rights issues over the interview footage and we call on CBS to do the decent thing and ensure the film is released to the wider television and cinematic audience it deserves.
You can read about From Babyn Yar to Freedom in the latest edition of Index. Dash Arts is currently working on a new project on Ukraine, The Reckoning in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, based on testimonies of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
18 Sep 2024 | Iran, News and features, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
In a perceptive video essay titled Irani Bag, made in 2020, Maryam Tafakory illustrates how Iranian filmmakers get around the Islamic taboo on touch. Interweaving her commentary with film clips from 1989 to 2018, she highlights how bags have long been a recurring device in Iranian films, allowing men and women to “touch” on screen.
In one clip, a man and a woman riding on a motorbike are separated – or connected – by a bag lying between them. It functions as a substitute for human touch or an object of shared intimacy.
A bag can also be an extension of the body, and Tafakory demonstrates how men and women in these scenes repeatedly push, pull or strike each other using bags.
By contrast, in the scenes she shows without a bag, hands hover centimetres away from another person – the actors forbidden from touching.
If no direct contact materialises on screen, the filmmaker can dodge censorship. And, as Tafakory shows, Iranian cinema has developed a cinematic language “to touch without touching”.
Touch is not the only prohibition in Iranian cinema. The government has sought to align cinema and other arts with its interpretation of Islamic principles, and an overarching rule is gender segregation, which prevents men and women who are not mahram (related by blood or marriage) from interacting with each other.
As part of this, the wearing of the veil in public is strictly policed, as witnessed by Mahsa Jina Amini’s police custody death in 2022 and the ensuing Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Since cinema is regarded as a public space, female characters are always expected to be veiled – even indoors with their families where they would not wear veils in real life.
Cinema is regulated by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG). Directors must submit their synopsis or screenplay for a production permit and, later, their completed film for a screening permit. At each stage they can be asked to make changes or otherwise risk censorship. When a film is released, the Iranian press can accuse the makers of siāh-namāyi: presenting the country in a negative light.
There are some obvious red lines for the censors: no direct criticism of Islam or Iran’s Islamic Republic, nothing too violent, and certainly no sex. But MCIG guidelines are not detailed, so moviemakers have learned other censorship criteria through trial and error.
What is permissible is always shifting due to changes in society and filmmakers pushing against boundaries.
It is important to observe that state censorship is not the only obstacle that Iranian filmmakers encounter. International funders and markets impose expectations of what their films should be about. Indeed, many filmmakers have reported to me that they find these restrictions to be as challenging as censorship.
But where censorship is concerned, filmmakers who want to explore intimacy and other sensitive topics must find creative ways to work around imposed constraints. This is reminiscent of Hollywood under the Production Code from 1934 to 1966 when political, religious and cultural restrictions on filmmaking compelled directors to employ subtle techniques that left more to viewers’ imaginations.
In Iranian cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, it was noticeable how often key roles were given to children. This was partly a creative response to new taboos as, in the early decades of the Islamic Republic, filmmakers realised that children could overcome constraints of gender segregation by acting as adult substitutes or purifiers of male-female contact.
For example, when the protagonist Nobar shares intimate moments with her lover Rasul in The Blue Veiled (1995), her youngest sibling, Senobar, serves as a mediator. Senobar even rests her head in Rasul’s lap, a proxy for her sister. The child lends an innocent aura to an erotically charged scene.
Children can also cross social boundaries and navigate between private and public spaces. In Jafar Panahi’s debut feature The White Balloon (1995), a little girl, Razieh, embarks on a quest to buy a goldfish for Nowruz (Persian New Year) and encounters people from different walks of life on Tehran’s streets, including an Afghan balloon seller.
Filmmakers have subtly used children to highlight Iran’s sociopolitical realities, among them the after-effects of the Iran-Iraq war (as in the 1989 film Bashu, the Little Stranger), the plight of the country’s Afghan minorities (The White Balloon) and the Kurds’ hardships on the Iran-Iraq border (for example, A Time for Drunken Horses from 2000, or 2004’s Turtles Can Fly).
The political climate has waxed and waned as moderate and hardline governments have relaxed censorship restrictions and tightened them again. Yet intermediaries for male-female contact have been enduring ploys throughout.
In one of several storylines in Tehran: City of Love (2018), a woman called Mina dates a man, Reza, who ultimately confesses he is married. As consolation, he couriers her a giant teddy bear. Subsequently, Mina is seen waiting at a bus shelter side-by-side with the gargantuan soft toy – Reza’s comic stand-in.
Another creative solution has been the use of the road movie genre. Simultaneously private and public, a car is a space that allows small, everyday transgressions. Being in a car relaxes the rules of compulsory veiling and encourages behaviour normally kept behind closed doors. It emboldens people to express themselves more freely. Filmmakers tap its emancipatory potential in both their production strategies and their on-screen representations.
In Ten (2002), a female passenger, whose fiancé has jilted her, removes her headscarf to reveal her head shaved in mourning and as a token of a new beginning. In Panahi’s Taxi Tehran (2015) – his third feature made clandestinely since his 2010 filmmaking ban – a series of passengers take a taxi. The cabbie is Panahi himself, masquerading in a beret. Before his ban, he was accustomed to filming in the bustling outdoors. With the car and small digital cameras, he can shoot outside again.
One of his passengers is lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, renowned for her work defending political prisoners. Like Panahi, she has been repeatedly imprisoned and banned from leaving Iran and practising her profession. As she gets out, she advises him to delete her words from his film to avoid more hassle from authorities. This is an underground film – made illegally, without official permits, and distributed on Iran’s black market and abroad. So Sotoudeh’s words survive the edit, registering the film’s furtive mode of production.
In Atomic Heart (2015), we first encounter Arineh and Nobahar intoxicated after a party. They are part of a modern, Westernised subculture that likes to revel, drink and take drugs, and largely rejects the Islamic Republic’s values. As their anti-regime attitude cannot be directly shown, the film hints at their unconventional lifestyle by inhabiting the road movie genre – associated with freedom and rebellion – as they whirl around nocturnal Tehran. The film evokes the subversive behaviour of real-life Iranian youth who, given restrictions on public gathering as well as bans on nightclubs and disapproval of open displays of romantic affection, have taken to the highways, especially at night.
Inserting a story within a story is a further tactic for circumventing censorship. In The Salesman (2016), Emad and Rana perform Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in an amateur theatre group. The film mirrors the play, highlighting the couple’s relationship after Rana is assaulted by an intruder in their apartment – a scene left unshown to avoid censorship and engage the audience in speculating about what transpired between Rana and her attacker. In the story within a story, meaning is multi-layered, residing in the inner as well as the outer tale.
Since short films are less strictly regulated by screening permit requirements, directors are bypassing these rules by composing feature films from several shorts. Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil (2020) comprises four short stories about characters involved in the state’s capital punishment system. Given Rasoulof’s filmmaking ban, his production team tactically applied for four short film permits without listing his name on the forms.
In Tales (2014), which was also created as multiple shorts joined together as a feature, a documentary filmmaker character shoots a film within a film. When an official notices his camera filming a workers’ protest, the recording halts. The film segues to the next story, suggesting the camera’s confiscation. Later, the filmmaker retrieves his camera without the seized footage. He determines to continue filming, stating: “No film will ever stay in the closet. Someday, somehow, whether we’re here or not, these films will be shown.” His words reflect a popular Iranian saying that a film’s purpose is to be shown to an audience.
These kinds of strategies are testament to Iranian filmmakers’ creativity. Although they cannot be overtly critical of the regime, they have developed resourceful ways to try to ensure that their films can explore sensitive topics and still be shown.
