Airport nightmare

Recently, award winning Iranian film-maker JAFAR PANAHI was detained at and deported from New York's JFK airport and treated like a criminal in spite of the fact that his travel papers were in order. In an e-mail to Gowri Ramnarayan, he narrates the horrible experience.

WHAT would you do if you landed in a foreign airport to change to a connecting flight to your destination in another country, but were immediately whisked off to a cell and chained to a bench for hours, even though your travel papers were in perfect order and you had been assured by your airline that no transit visa was necessary? How would you react if your captors wanted to fingerprint and photograph you as if you were a criminal?

All of us know that racism is a bitter, omnipresent reality. No nation, however "liberal", is free from its fangs. Yet, it is one thing to read about victims in Serbia or South Africa, and quite another to hear how someone you know was force-fed on a brutal dose of racist discrimination. That too right under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, guardian angel of the most affluent democracy in the world.

I learnt about the airport nightmare through an e-mail from Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, whom I had met at the Venice film festival last year and interviewed for The Hindu

(September 24, 2000). His film "The Circle" went on to win six prizes there, including the festival's highest award for Best Film, and the Fipresci Prize of international critics.

Ironically, while Panahi was humiliated by the U.S. immigration authorities at the JFK airport, "The Circle" was being screened at the Angelika Centre and the Lincoln Plaza cinemas in the same city, with a rave review from the New Yorker's (April 23-30) finicky critic. He finds it "a devastating study in commonplace terror. There isn't a violent act in the movie, yet repression and violence condition the emotional atmosphere of every scene...(The film) is a highly distilled and aesthetic rendering of certain outrages."

And believe it or not, one of Panahi's more recent awards for "The Circle" is from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, U.S.. Awards, however, are not new to this film-maker who began as assistant to the world renowned auteur Abbas Kiarostami. He won the Camera d'Or (Cannes) and the Golden Leopard (Locarno) for his own productions, among which the "White Balloon" remains moving for its poeticity.

Over to Jafar Panahi:

Tehran, April 23, 2001.

"On April 15, I left the Hong Kong Film Festival to go to the Montevideo and Buenos Aires Festivals, on United Airline's flight 820. This 30-hour trip was via New York's JFK airport where I had two hours to change my flight to Montevideo. On my request, the staff of both those Festivals had checked if a transit visa was required and they assured me there was no need for such a visa. Since the airliner had issued me the ticket via New York, I asked the United Airlines staff at the Hong Kong airport if I needed a transit visa to the U.S. and I heard the same response.

"As soon as I arrived at JFK airport, the American police took me to an office, asked for my fingerprints and wanted to photograph me because of my nationality. I refused to do it and I showed them my invitations to the Festivals. They threatened to put me in jail if I did not do the fingerprinting.

"I asked for an interpreter and to make a telephone call. They refused. They chained me as they did medieval prisoners and took me in a police patrol to another part of the airport, where there were many people from different countries. They passed me to another policemen. They chained my feet and locked my chain to the others, all locked to a very dirty bench. For 10 hours, no questions and answers; I was forced to sit on that bench, pressed to the others. I could not even move. I was suffering from an old illness, however, nobody noticed. Again, I requested them to let me call someone in New York, but they refused. They not only ignored my request but also that of a boy from Sri Lanka who wanted to call his mother. Everybody was moved by the crying of the boy - people from Mexico, Peru, Eastern Europe, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. I remember thinking that every country has its own laws, but I just could not understand those inhuman acts.

"The next morning, another policeman came to me and said that they had to take my photograph. I said no and I showed them my personal photos. They said no, they had to take my photo (the way criminals are photographed) and do the fingerprinting. I refused. An hour later, two other men came to me and threatened me, saying they would fingerprint me and photograph me by computer and again I refused and asked for a phone. At last, they allowed me to call

Dr. Jamsheed Akrami, Iranian film professor at Columbia University. I explained the whole story to him. I requested him to convince them that he knows me well, that

I was not the person they were looking for.

"Two hours later, a policeman came to me and took my picture. They chained me again and took me to a plane that was going back to

Hong Kong.

"On the plane and from my window, I could see New York. I knew my film, 'The Circle', had been released there two days ago and I was told the film was very well received too. However, the audiences would have understood my film better if they had know that the director of the film was chained at the same time. They would accept my beliefs that the circles of human limits do exist in any part of this world but with different ratios. I saw the Statue of Liberty in the waters and I unconsciously smiled. I tried to draw the curtain and there were scars of the chain on my hand. I could not stand the other travellers gazing at me and I wanted to stand up and cry that I'm not a thief, I'm not a murderer, I'm not a drug dealer. I...I am just an Iranian, a film-maker. But how I could tell this, in what language? In Chinese, Japanese or in the mother tongues of those people from Mexico, Peru, Russia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh or in the language of that young boy from Sri Lanka? Really, in what language?

"I had not slept for 16 hours and I had to spend another 15 hours on my way back to Hong Kong. It was torture among all those watching eyes. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But I could not. I could just see the images of those sleepless women and men who were still chained."

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