Dehnamaki’s overnight shift from right-winger who likes to beat up those with whom he disagrees to subtle intellect and filmmaker has startled everyone from right-wingers who beat up reformists who disgust them to reformists disgusted at being beaten up.
No one knows quite what to make of Dehnamaki, who now has few friends on either the right or the left. But it appears he has lots of admirers among filmgoers.
His fifth film, “Outcasts 3,” premiered just before Now Ruz and has so far drawn 800,000 moviegoers, raking in $2.5 million over two weeks, a record, the Fars news agency reported.
Was that a fluke? It doesn’t look like it.
Just two years ago, his fourth film “Outcasts 2,” grossed the equivalent of $1.3 million in its first week, far more than any other film in Iranian history, PressTV reported then. It total gross to date is $9 million, according to industry officials, by far the largest gross of any Iranian film.
And the record “Outcasts 2” broke in 2009 had been set in 2006 by the first “Outcasts” movie!
Dehnamaki hasn’t stopped seeing conspiracies, however. He said his latest film would have drawn many more moviegoers if not for those plotting against him. He said some people had made pirated copies of the movie and were selling them on the streets to discourage people from going to movie houses. He didn’t grant that people might be making pirated copies because they knew a Dehnamaki film would sell well.
Dehnamaki said another ploy to try to harm his film’s popularity was to stick an endorsement of the green movement at the beginning of a copy posted on the Internet.
Dehnamaki is both the writer and director of the “Outcasts” comedy series, called “Ekhrajiha” in Farsi.
“Outcasts 3” is set during the 2009 presidential election and mocks those who ran against President Ahmadi-nejad. The Green opposition has campaigned against the film for several months. But that may just have wetted curiosity about the movie and drawn more people to view it.
The first “Outcasts” film introduced Iranians to a cast of thieves, junkies and assorted other lowlifes who unwillingly end up on the battlefield and decide they should do something good to help defend their country at the start of the Iran-Iraq. The authorities, however, don’t want a company of misfits and reject them, only to relent later in the film. The first film ends with one of the misfits sacrificing his life in a minefield so his fellow soldiers can escape an ambush.
The second film in the trilogy takes the gang back on the battlefield where they are trapped and become prisoners of war confined to a brutal Iraqi camp.
Dehnamaki was an enthusiastic revolutionary who joined the military at the start of the war with Iraq and took part in the 1982 liberation of Khorramshahr, Iran’s greatest triumph of the war.
Later, he helped found Ansar-e Hezbollah, a band of street toughs supported by the regime’s ultra-hardliners. The band won fame by taking after reformist demonstrators with chains wielded by men on the backs of swarming motorcycles. They once invaded a television studio to thrash a program host before the cameras.
Dehnamaki went on to found a series of extremist newspapers and magazines, showing a knack for writing as well as whipping.
Around 2000, he dropped out of Ansar-e Hezbollah and reappeared in 2002 as the director of “Poverty and Prostitution,” a documentary that found prostitution was rooted in poverty rather than some foreign conspiracy. It wasn’t clear if his resort this week to a conspiracy theory about critics of his latest movie was sincere belief or just a return to a crutch commonly resorted to in Iranian society.
In 2004, Dehnamaki directed another documentary and then in 2006 moved on to “Outcasts.”
Dehnamaki explained his conversion from street thuggery by saying, “There was a time I believed the people were the problem. But that was a mistake. The real problems are our rulers, who have become used to corruption and cannot fulfill the promises of the early days of the revolution about social justice and equality.”
In 2006, Dehnamaki sent an open letter to President Ahmadi-nejad warning him against his “fundamentalist and backward supporters … who have reduced the ‘promotion of virtue and prevention of vice’ [a Qoranic edict] to fighting against women’s clothing while ignoring justice.” From the beginning of his first term, Ahmadi-nejad has been unenthusiastic about the dress code. He told a reporter after being elected in 2005 that he had “better things to do” than worry about what women wore. But the bulk of those in the regime do not agree.
Dehnamaki explains that he supports modernization, but within the confines of observant Islam. He has said that if Iran opposes the strict Islam of the Taliban as the regime says, “then we must offer a good model of Islam that is a source of compassion and kindness.”
“Outcasts” was announced as a trilogy. Now that Dehna-maki has produced three films in the series, it remains to be seen what he will move on to next.