Eye-opening documentary examines the world of Iran’s transsexual community
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
MOVIEReviewKONG RITHDEE
To be or not to be
Eye-opening documentary examines the world of Iran’s transsexual community
Be Like Others
- A documentary directed by Tanaz Eshaghian. Showing at the Bangkok International Film Festival tomorrow at 8pm. In Farsi with English and Thai subtitles at SF CentralWorld
At the beginning of the documentary, Be Like Others, we read the text that’s as surprising as it is straightforward: “In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country with strict social mores and traditional values, sex-change operations are legal. Over twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini issued an edict making sex change permissible for diagnosed transsexuals. Yet homosexuality is still punishable by death.”
In this 74-minute movie made by Iranian-American Tanaz Eshaghian, and which will be showing tomorrow at the Bangkok International Film Festival, the issues of transsexuals and homosexuality in Iran are examined through social, legal, theological and personal prisms, revealing many startling facts and kindling more curiosities. At first glance, the very fact that Iran, a country generally associated with religious conservatism, allows people to choose their sex sounds like the most liberal, forward-thinking gesture - the state will even alter the sex in the birth certificate of post-op patients. But as the men who want to become women tell us in the film, such practice is not always a legal manifestation of progressive freedom. It is, instead, a law that suggests the complex social and spiritual structures of the society ruled chiefly by the consent of God.
Be Like Others won the Teddy Award for gay and lesbian films at the Berlin Intl Film Festival this year. The doc takes place largely in the spare waiting room in the clinic of Dr Bahram Mir Jalali’s, the leading expert in sex change surgery who has helped nearly 500 men be “reborn”. Here is where young men in sensuous eyeliner and, sometimes, a Muslim hijab, discuss the social stigma heaped upon them because of their condition. As boys who’re dressed up as girls, they are harassed by nearly everyone, if not immediately arrested by the police the minute they set foot on the street. Once they officially become women - a process that requires the approval of state psychiatrists, who always deem these men “abnormal” before issuing the permit for the patients to get an operation - the harassment stops. By law, they’ve become women, and since the Iranian law is the interpretation of God’s words, no one can question it.
Of course things aren’t that simple. Be Like Others, save for the final minutes when it gives in to surface sentimentalism, is fascinating because it looks at the topic from many different angles. We meet parents who are not always supportive of their sons’ decision to go over the other side. We hear a cool, charming Islamic scholar explain that transsexuals are not forbidden in the Koran, but that homosexuality is. We also learn how it’s more difficult for boys from small towns to go through the change than urban men in Tehran, where social pressure is less intense.
These issues find their anchors in Vida, a 24-year-old post-op “woman” who takes the confused Ali, a young man from the province who’s preparing to go under the scalpel, under her wings, and in Anoosh, a feisty momma’s boy who’s dating another boy and eager to go through the transformation - and to possibly marry his beau. Presiding over the fates of these people is Dr Mir Jalali, the brutally honest and at times cocky doctor who says that the first thing he tells his patients is: “this operation is the operation from hell” and that they will probably suffer even more, physically and mentally, after the surgery.
The central issue of Be Like Others is maybe the definition of freedom. For these Iranian boys, they have to choose sides, but they’re not allowed not to choose - to remain, say, in the middle and see how things run their course. “Why do you want to be a woman when it’s not easy to be a woman in this country?” wonders a woman to a man who’s preparing to have an operation. Perhaps because being in the middle - be like no others - has proved more difficult; we even detect a note of condescension that transsexuals may have against gays.
To be or not to be, and to be what? - these dilemmas persist, even though it’s possible to let yourself be legally declared “sick” and seek a proper “cure”. Like most good documentaries, Be Like Others answers questions then forces us to ask many more.
