2024-05-09 21:25:13
This year, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities will go to Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born French comic book artist and director of animated films. She earned one of the most prestigious awards in the Spanish-speaking world as “an essential voice in the defense of human rights” and as a symbol of civil society led by women, writes the AP agency.
“With her courage and artistic creation, Marjane Satrapi ranks among the most influential personalities who stimulate dialogue between cultures and generations,” said the awarding foundation of Princess Leonor, the 18-year-old heir to the Spanish throne, after whom the award is named.
The fifty-four-year-old artist became famous with the autobiographical comic Persepolis about a determined young girl from a modern socialist-oriented family who grows up in Iran during the Islamic revolution. Faced with a fundamentalist regime that forces girls to cover their hair and separates them from boys, the heroine flees to Vienna at her parents’ request, where she graduates from a French grammar school. After four years, he returns to Tehran and once again tries to get along with the regime. However, he has no understanding for her type of personality – and moreover for a woman. In the sequel called Persepolis 2, the heroine, like the author herself, emigrates to France for good.
The book from 2006 continued the French tradition of comics for adults, but for many of the wider public it was one of the first works that used pictures to tell a more complex story and moved the previously often children’s comic genre closer to adults.
According to the publication, an animated film of the same name was created in 2007, which Marjane Satrapi shot with Vincent Paronnaud. He won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination. The picture defending the ideal of freedom from the point of view of a teenage girl and capturing all kinds of paradoxes, for example when the model is literally covered from eyes to toe during nude drawing classes at an art school in Iran and Botticelli’s Venus also has her body covered for moral reasons, was also awarded at Třeboň Anifest. On the contrary, the Iranian government of the then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned it as “Islamophobic”, although it eventually allowed the censored version to be screened.
Back in 2011, the movie Persepolis caused a stir in Tunisia. The audience was dismayed by the scene in which the heroine turns to God. The picture depicts him as a child imagines him, which of course violates the Islamic prohibition to embody God in any way. After the film was broadcast on private Tunisian television, hundreds of Islamists demonstrated in front of its headquarters, demanding, among other things, the introduction of Islamic law. In the end, the police had to intervene against them, the ČTK agency wrote at the time.
Since then, Marjane Satrapi has translated the children’s books Strašidla se bojí měše and Ajdar, records of intimate conversations of Iranian women called Shitíčko or Kuře na švestkách, which is the story of a player on the stringed instrument tar, whose wife breaks the hero in an argument.
Also according to Chicken on plums, a feature film was made in 2011, in which Mathieu Amalric, Golšifte Farahaní or Chiara Mastroianni acted. Czech viewers could also see the author’s bloody film Voices of a killer who talks to animals.
Last year, Marjane Satrapi and a collective of authors published a graphic novel called Femme, vie, liberté (Women, life, freedom). He was reacting to the Iranian protests caused by the brutal assassination of Mahse Amin. She died at the age of 22 in 2022 after being detained by Iran’s morality police for wearing a hijab that was too loose. The death of a young woman in the country sparked large-scale demonstrations, and the slogan Women, life, freedom became one of their slogans.
She collaborated with political scientist Farid Vahid, journalist Jean-Pierre Perrin, historian Abbas Milani and seventeen cartoonists on the book about the young martyr Marjane Satrapi.
Polish journalist Adam Michnik, American photographer Annie Leibovitz, Italian writer Umberto Eco and Mexican writer Alma Guillermoprieto won the Princess of Asturias prize in the field of communication and humanities already in the new millennium. In 1997, the then Czech President Václav Havel also became a laureate of the award, at that time still called the Prince of Asturias Award.
Video: Trailer z filmu Persepolis
The 2007 film Persepolis won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. | Video: Artcam Films