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Tuesday
May 22, 2001

Googoosh documentary

My name is Farhad Zamani and I am a filmmaker who very recently completed a feature-length documentary about Googoosh which took me over two years to make.

In light of the project that has consumed so much of my life the past few years, I find the dicussions which have been generated by Ms. Sabety's piece on Googoosh ["Googoosh, the myth"] -- and Mr. Tabib's response to it ["Romanticizing the past"] -- very interesting. And in fact, my film is thematically made very much in the style of Ms. Sabety's article. It is an exploration of Iranian culture and history through the prolific life of Fae-gheh Atashin (Googoosh). It uses Googoosh's life as a metaphor to locate roots of malaise in our society.

I guess what interests me most with these continuing discussions is what happens to someone when they achieve icon-status. Specifically, the Googoosh story -- for me -- has always been about a woman who was forced to live out her life in the public arena (by the father who turned her into a child-performer and then the husbands who built their careers around her, etc.), only to be forced to live a life in seclusion and silence (i.e. the Islamic Republic which forbade public female performances in Iran). A fascinating story by itself.

More significant for me, however, is the Googoosh "icon" or "myth" which has been about ownership (hence the title of my film, "Googoosh: Iran's Daughter"). Is Googoosh her father's daughter? Mahmoud Ghorbani's creation? A mouthpiece for progressive songwriters and lyricists? The Shah's Westernized doll? The Islamic Republic's symbol of all that was wrong with the Pahlavi Regime? One can never be sure because as "our" icon, we -- the public -- can project our own desires/ pathologies/ needs on to her.

Is Googoosh a feminist heroine? I think not (and I don't think that is what Ms. Sabety was saying with her writing and analysis). However, Googoosh did represent a kind of liberation for women in Iran in 1970's. And I believe this "independence" that she projected was not something that she was totally aware of, but was -- in many ways -- a kind of veneer that was indicative of the time (that is not to say that some women didn't internalize these liberating elements that Googoosh was a small part of).

Farhad Zamani
Atash Productions

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