Hassan Nazer was in his first month at university in Iran when he realised that he would have to leave his homeland to fulfil his dream of becoming a film-maker. As a fledgling theatre director, he had been “red-flagged” – a possibly irredeemable offence – for putting women on stage in the holy city of Mashhad. His father, who ran a family confectionery business from a factory outside Tehran, had been opposed to his career choice from the start, but one of his uncles was on his side. “He said, after you get a red flag in this age, they’re not going to let you work. So basically, if you want to go into cinema or continue with theatre, this is not your place. You need to leave.”
Nazer had avoided military service, and had no passport or visa, so his uncle paid for him to be smuggled across the border into Turkey. “I didn’t have a destination at the time, I just wanted to go somewhere else,” he says. It took six gruelling months, often travelling on foot, to reach Europe, where his uncle put him in touch with a Kurdish family who had found asylum in Scotland and were willing to help, as they had been helped by his family back in Iran at an early stage of their own migration.
This global refugee story is a quiet presence in Nazer’s new film, Winners. The protagonist is the nine-year-old son of an Afghan immigrant, eking out a living in an isolated Iranian village. Like the director himself, Yahya pursues a passion for the movies in the teeth of parental opposition, staying up late to watch old classics lent to him by the supervisor of a scrapyard, to whom children sell bags of rubbish they have scavenged from a rubbish tip. Being of lowly status, Yahya is only allowed to collect plastics, with disastrous results when he is discovered by the local bully to have a mysterious gold figurine secreted beneath his jacket.
The film, which won the audience award at the Edinburgh film festival last year, is both a love song to Iranian cinema, set in a gloriously photogenic landscape of derelict desert settlements, and a heartwarming story of childhood ingenuity and friendship. It’s the most autobiographical of the five films he’s written and directed, says Nazer, who replaced the first actor he chose to play Yahya, “because he wasn’t enough like me”. Did the immaculately groomed 43–year-old man who is talking over Zoom from his home in Aberdeen really once pick over rubbish dumps? Yes, he says with a laugh, and he too was relegated to plastics rather than higher value metal objects.
The difference is that, whereas Yahya’s earnings support his widowed mother, Nazer’s financed a surreptitious film habit. While Yahya is enthralled by Cinema Paradiso, nine-year-old Nazer’s favourite film was Seven Samurai. He was introduced to the work of the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa by Abbas Kiarostami, one of four Iranian directors to whom Winners is dedicated. “In television interviews, Mr Kiarostami was always talking about Kurosawa. I said, ‘Who’s this director, I need to see his work.’ I got very much attached to it and still I think there’s nobody like him.”
On arrival in Scotland in 2000, Nazer worked in a takeaway and took a language course. He then signed up for a degree in film and visual culture at Aberdeen University and began to build a restaurant business on the side. “Even though my father is a wealthy person, so he could have helped me, he didn’t want me to go into the cinema, so I was determined to stand on my own two feet,” he says. Eventually he raised enough money to start producing his own low-budget films.
Nazer’s status as an outsider director was never clearer than in 2015, when his fourth film, Utopia – a drama involving three intersecting stories in three languages – was nominated for a foreign language Oscar by Afghanistan, but disqualified because it had too much English in it. “They count every word of English and we just crossed 50 per cent,” he says. “It was very unfortunate because it was so last minute that we couldn’t do anything about it. But I think there is an advantage for a director if you can bring different cultures into a movie, because you have a wider audience.” Utopia was in Hindi as well as English and the Afghan language, Dari, and Nazer has since gone on to direct a film in India.
Iran’s incident-strewn history with international film awards – including the refusal of another of the film’s dedicatees, Asghar Farhadi, to pick up his Oscar for The Salesman in 2017 in protest over Donald Trump’s travel ban – becomes a running gag in Winners. The golden figurine that Yahya and his best friend, Leyla, find in the desert turns out to be an Oscar, which has been lost on its journey from Hollywood to Tehran thanks to a series of comic misadventures. Parsa Maghami and Helia Mohammadkhani, who play the two children, join a long line of untrained Iranian child actors including the stars of The White Balloon (1995) and Children of Heaven (1997), made by the other directors that Winners is dedicated to, Jafar Panahi and Majid Majidi.
Why do so many Iranian films feature children? It’s partly because all Iranian children seem born actors, Nazer says, but also because portrayals of relationships between the sexes are only permissible before puberty. In Winners, the children dress the Oscar in a skirt to preserve Leyla’s modesty. There is a lovely moment when Yahya buys Leyla some goldfish that they release into a well, then sit around it, dangling their legs together in the water. It’s as clearly a love scene as any that could be made with adults.
But Nazer has to be careful not to offend the Iranian censors. It is important to him to be allowed to film there, but also, as a hand-to-mouth independent film-maker, Iran’s thriving movie culture – in a country where most foreign imports are banned – makes his films financially viable. “The thing about making a film in Iran,” he says, “is that if you make it past the censors, and get through all the procedure with the ministry, you’re going to get released. There is home video, there’s cinema, and there’s a lot of television, so basically some income is guaranteed.”
Winners is supported by Screen Scotland, but his films have only recently started to attract any funding. He financed his first three himself through his earnings as a restaurateur and chef. At one point, he ran three takeaways and a cafe, but he has now retrenched and owns just one, the Cafe Harmony. It specialises in Italian and Mediterranean food and “is kind of very well known in Aberdeen”.
Now that he has dual nationality, he is no longer under such scrutiny in Iran, where Winners was filmed only minutes away from his family’s confectionery factory. The trickiest moment involved a late scene where Yahya carries the Oscar to Tehran’s Cinema Museum in a taxi that, unbeknown to the boy, is driven by Jafar Panahi. It is very coded; all you see is the back of the driver’s head. However, it is not only an in-joke but a gesture of political solidarity. “You are in the cinema too?” Yahya asks. “It depends what you mean by ‘in the cinema’,” replies Panahi, who won a Golden Bear in Berlin in 2015 for his film Taxi, but was unable to collect it in person because he was under house arrest and banned from filming. Any remotely knowledgeable Iranian filmgoer would understand the significance.
Nazer sat behind the censors in the accreditation screening. “I was very nervous. I was watching them as the taxi scene began. They were looking at each other and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m not going to get through’.” The censors deferred their decision, but ended up giving the film the go-ahead. “Usually you get a few notes and have to make some edits, but I got none with this; I was very surprised.”
He’s now the father of a seven-year-old son, who has a poster for Cinema Paradiso on his Aberdeen bedroom wall, along with a few Disney films. “He loves watching films with me, particularly ones involving children.” But though the family’s main home is now in Scotland, Nazer is adamant he will never stop looking towards the land of his birth. “I always try to bring Iranian culture into my movies, because it’s something I cannot get away from myself,” he says. “Even if the story is happening somewhere completely different, there will always be a character from Iran.”
Winners is in cinemas from 17 March
