Drawing on the rich artistic heritage of textile design, Persian folk tales, calligraphy and miniature painting, Iranian animation is recognised in its home country not merely as a form of entertainment but as a medium closely related to drawing, painting and the visual arts. Running in conjunction with the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, this landmark program, curated by Kathryn Weir for the Australian Cinematheque, brings together work by some of the most prodigious Iranian animators of the past half century. This week's highlights include Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, screening on Friday at 6pm, which is based on Satrapi's marvellous autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. Technically, Persepolis is a French film, not an Iranian one, and indeed Satrapi has not been back to Iran since since before the first instalment of the novel was released in France in 2000. But one can hardly protest its inclusion here, especially in light of events in Iran last year: the film, like the book, is a passionate call for individual liberty in the face of a repressive regime, and it is unsurprising that Satrapi, along with fellow Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was among those to speak out against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government after last year's highly controversial presidential election and the violence that followed. But it is the film's aesthetic, not its politics, that is in the end most striking: its pristine black-and-white imagery, lifted straight from the book, puts paid to any argument that animation cannot aspire to or reach the level of art.

Review, 9 January 2010