Although the Cannes Festival ignored the requests of the Farabi Foundation to bar the film from screening, the Bangkok International Film Festival succumbed to the pressure imposed by the Iranian Embassy in Thailand and pulled the film from its festival. Their complaint was that the film misrepresents ‘the glorious’ aspects of the Islamic Revolution thus the principal issue, for the Iranian government, was the film’s interpretation of Iranian history.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Farabi Cinema Foundation issued a letter to organisers of the Cannes Film Festival condemning their inclusion of Persepolis in the festival. The film, however, is as reviled by Muslim state officials as it is celebrated by critics in the West. Most notably, it won the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film, losing the award to Ratatouille. Persepolis is a critically acclaimed film that was nominated for and won several prestigious international film awards. Eventually, she gets married and divorced, and then leaves Iran again – this time for good. There she has difficulty re-adapting to her old home. Four years after her arrival in Europe, and following a failed love affair, a nervous breakdown, a period of homelessness and serious illness, Marji returns to Iran. In Vienna, we follow her story as she struggles with the travails of life in exile and her guilt about living in the security of Europe while her family and friends in Iran suffer through the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war. The story follows Marji from childhood to early adolescence in the Islamic Republic of Iran at which point her parents send her abroad to Vienna.

The film begins just before the 1979 revolution in Iran, and unfolds from the perspective of Marji, a precocious 10-year-old girl from an upper-class, Marxist intellectual family. An animated feature film based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comics about her coming of age in revolutionary Iran.

Marjane satrapi's