Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Barbod

Barbod Barbod, the filmmaker who works in Los Angeles, earlier recalled how the revolutionary censors affected not only his documentary record of the revolution , but his decision to leave Iran. He now speaks of the stages of his domestic and professional adjustment to forced migration and exile. Two years after his original interview, I called him on the telephone to ask about his film about Neusha Farrahi, the Iranian who, in February 1987, set himself on fire on the steps of the Federal Building in Los Angeles in protest against the Islamic Republic. This segment includes his response during that conversation. For these four years that I have been forced to be out of Iran, I have traveled many countries, not out of choice but out of necessity. I have proved to myself that it is not only Iran where I can work but wherever I am in the world. Yet, I miss being home. I miss sensing, feeling, touching that earth, that weather, and that people. I feel I could be more useful there. But I will not go back in the present situation. I will not cooperate with the present government . I will not try to bring them any sort of glory, honor, or justification for their existence. I’m not criticizing the artists who are still there. I think those who are there and can work and can leave behind a document of the present situation in Iran are all doing great work. I admire their work. But I am against giving the government any sort of honor, any sort of legitimacy. I had two problems staying in Iran—first, I was from a Baha’i family, and second, I was affiliated with the Left, with the whole range of leftists from the Fadayaan to the Hezb Tudeh to the Mojahedin to the Komoleh. I worked with all these people. I have made films for the Mojahedin and for the Fadayaan. I have made films and traveled all over the world from the Far East to the Soviet Union. And we probably owe all this to Mr. Khomeini, who forced us abroad. In a sense we have been forced into a compulsory scholarship of running around the world, given to us by the Islamic government. What specific difficulties have you experienced in exile? Many difficulties. After all the rewards and awards that came to me as a successful filmmaker at home where I had a very comfortable life, when I barbod 211 arrived in Los Angeles I had fifty dollars in my pocket and that was all. I had a place to stay for probably one month with a cousin. That was all I had. It was hard to start from scratch. Nobody is willing to accept you. You are illegal. I didn’t have a passport, so I couldn’t even get a driving license. It was hard. And your children were away at home, and you don’t know what might happen to them. Will they be able to get out of the country? What will become of them because of you? I had arranged to be legally separated from my wife so that the government would not associate them with me, so they could be freed from my taint and not be touched by it. I knew, for instance, that on the third day after I left the country, government agents went to my house to catch me, and I knew that my family had been under surveillance, to see if they had any connection with me. I had no job and no home. I was not a twenty-one-year-old just out of school. Rather I was a forty-two-year-old who found it difficult to start again. But I did. I started working in a one-hour photo lab at $3.50 an hour. I worked after hours. After filming feature films and after making films that went to festivals and won awards, I started my postrevolutionary life in the United States by filming weddings. And I could hear Iranians saying, “You know who that guy is who’s holding the camera? He’s that big name so-and-so. Now he has to shoot our wedding for two hundred or three hundred dollars.” I was not ashamed of shooting a wedding and earning my living—but you have to understand our culture, the way people talk and the way it can hurt you...