In Till Schauder’s The Iran Job, a culturally clueless basketball player named Kevin Sheppard travels to Shiraz, Iran to play in the Iranian Basketball Super League for one year, in an attempt to boost the performance of the novice A.S. Shiraz team so it can qualify for the league play-offs. Sheppard is wary of the political climate in Iran, not just for its increasing temperature, but because he is uncomfortable discussing politics. For him, life equals basketball. But as he begins to ingratiate himself into Iranian society, he realizes that life in the country is inherently political.
It’s a shame this documentary’s structure doesn’t match Sheppard’s gradual awareness; instead, The Iran Job opens crudely with politically significant quotes from American politicians about war with Iran (the infamous Axis of Evil quote from George Bush and Hillary Clinton’s affirmation when asked if the U.S. would attack Iran should it bomb Israel). These clips are parallel-edited with racially insensitive comments from Sheppard and his family as they describe his difficult decision to accept the contract. Thus, The Iran Job locates its political position with the typical Western stereotype of Iran: a nation recognized solely for its rhetoric-spouting leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic, rather than as a diverse, complicated and rich culture that dates back millennia. It’s a bold, problematic decision to open a film so bluntly, as it refers to standard Iranian stereotypes without calling them into question. The film asks us to identify with a racist idiot abroad. Without stripping Sheppard of some valor to make the situation comedic and understandable, the process of suture becomes immediately impossible. Are we supposed to identify with Sheppard because he’s American, and he will guide us into this unusual, foreign land? The film tells us yes. When explaining how wary he was about Iran (something about crazy imams and riding camels), Sheppard says: “But God put something in my spirit and said, ‘You need to get away from the familiar and get to the unfamiliar.’” The quote cements the film’s thesis of do-gooder American exploring the exotic Orient, as if such a narrative premise hasn’t already been outdated (and deemed racist) by 50 years. By the time the film actually begins to explore the lives of Iranian subjects, it’s too late to provide a formidable critique against the stereotypes Sheppard eventually abandons.
The people Sheppard comes to know in Shiraz — the owner, coach and fellow members of the team, his physiotherapist, his three female friends, his Afghan building superintendent — are subjects we get to know fairly well in The Iran Job, but rarely are they given a chance to voice off in the film without some kind of redeeming or critical comment from Sheppard. When the owner and coach introduce themselves to the camera, the coach’s name isn’t even included in the subtitles, though he distinctly announces his name. Occasionally, dialogue that makes sense in the context of a scene is not translated into subtitles. This is usually the case when people fail to translate certain things into English for Sheppard, again equating the film’s point of view with Sheppard’s. While he does become more enlightened about the plight of the Iranians over time, there are some things Sheppard refuses to accept, and the film remains fixed on positioning itself within Sheppard’s sphere of opinion, particularly when Islam clashes with Sheppard’s ideas about life and death. When his friend Eladeh explains the purpose behind the Day of Ashura, a day of mourning for Ali’s martyrdom (Prophet Mohammad’s grandson), Sheppard argues that he doesn’t see the point of commemorating someone’s death when one could be remembering what they lived to accomplish. Eladeh is not given a chance to respond in the film. It’s intrinsically unknowable if the Iranian subjects ever respond because the documentary is edited in such a way as to deny the real-time flow of events. It’s possible that his friends don’t respond out of politeness, but an ethical documentarian should know what kind of message they are giving by allowing an opinionated American have the final word on such a heady topic.
This is not to suggest that the film is devoid of some genuinely revelatory scenes about Iranian life. These moments are too rare and frequently too short. While Sheppard gets to know his three female Iranian friends quite well, he has a challenge getting his fellow basketball players to open up and talk about love. During dinner at a restaurant, his colleague Kami explains how his marriage didn’t work. Sheppard is incredulous that a man of such young age has already been married and divorced. Kami bemoans vague, banal relationship woes for all of a few seconds before the film cuts to a restaurant crooner singing a popular Persian ballad, “Soltan-e Ghalbha.” The Iranian basketball players start singing along with other diners and they translate the lyrics for Sheppard: “The world is small … You are the king of my heart.” These men know the poetic renditions of love in their popular culture long before they can comprehend it literally in their own lives. It’s a very brief scene but I couldn’t help think about the importance of love poetry in Iranian culture, its permeating influence even in the lives of young adults who have begun to understand heartache.
Schauder unfortunately doesn’t allow most of these scenes to breathe (one greatly comedic scene involving a Bob-Marley-loving merchant is jarringly sandwiched between two political sound bites), and as the film winds back to Sheppard’s life after the team places fifth in the playoffs, the lessons he learned while abroad don’t transcend beyond the basic building blocks of having empathy for other cultures. It’s initially understandable why the film is peppered with so many references to political discourse. Sheppard visited Iran during Obama’s inauguration and left just before the Iranian elections that mobilized the Green Wave Movement. He left as young Iranians, including his new friends, were abandoning their lifelong necessity to hew to social norms and laws (they are often the same thing) for a newfound confidence in political demonstration. After witnessing the oppression of his female friends, Sheppard was concerned for their well-being and the experience gave him an enlightened notion of political involvement in a country full of educated women who, in Sheppard’s words, “still have a lot of fighting to do.” But a documentary that explores a heady topic like female oppression in Iran while still stereotyping the culture and seen through the eyes of a culturally ignorant American can’t possibly be interesting or educational to anyone but people who believe all Iranians are terrorists. Which makes me question the “value” of documentaries that aim to educate the lowest common denominator. They may seem redeemable if they do affect and educate viewers who are prejudiced against the subject of the film, but they speak down to everyone else.