Marjane Satrapi’s black-and-white Tehran is going back up on a cinema screen. The vOilah! French Film Festival, organized by the Embassy of France and running from November 12 to 29, is paying tribute to her with two screenings of Persepolis, her 2007 animated film, at Filmhouse in the Golden Mile Tower. The first is on Saturday, November 14. The second is on Sunday, November 22, which would have been her 57th birthday.
In his welcome note for the festival, the French ambassador, Stephen Marchisio, called the film “a remarkable account of the struggle of the Iranian population” and said that her “tireless fight for human rights resonates with other movies featured this year.”
A girl in a veil, and a punk jacket
Satrapi was born in Rasht, in northern Iran, on November 22, 1969, to a family of left-wing activists, and was a schoolgirl in Tehran when the revolution came in 1979. She moved to France in 1994, studied at the art school in Strasbourg and fell in with a group of young cartoonists in Paris. Persepolis, her memoir of growing up between the Shah, the mullahs and the war with Iraq, came out in four volumes from the independent house L’Association between 2000 and 2003. It has sold well over a million copies in France alone and has been translated around the world.
The film, which she wrote and directed with Vincent Paronnaud, won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007 and was nominated for the Oscar for best animated feature. Chiara Mastroianni gave Marji her voice, with Catherine Deneuve as her mother and Danielle Darrieux as the formidable grandmother who keeps jasmine in her bra. Plenty of people first learned what life in Iran was like from that grandmother.
“Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life”
A love story to the end
Those were the words her family gave the press when she died in Paris on June 4. Mattias Ripa, a Swedish economist she met on his first day in Paris as an exchange student, had died in April 2025. He worked on almost everything she made, as producer, actor, co-writer and the translator of her books. In February she set up a foundation in both their names at the Académie des beaux-arts, where she had been elected a member. Each year it will bring two foreign students, one woman and one man, to study film in Paris, with a monthly grant of €1,500 and help with the move.
She never made things comfortable for officials, in Tehran or in Paris. In January 2025 she turned down France’s Legion of Honor, citing what she called the country’s hypocritical attitude toward Iran. At her funeral at Père-Lachaise on June 19, with Deneuve and Golshifteh Farahani among the mourners, the crowd held up copies of Persepolis and chanted “Woman, life, freedom” as the hearse drove away.
A word from the desk
There is something rather lovely about a French festival in Singapore choosing a Saturday matinee and a birthday Sunday afternoon for an Iranian girl’s coming-of-age story. Few books have done more to show readers far from Tehran a country rather than a headline. If you are anywhere near the Golden Mile on the 22nd, go, and take someone young with you. If not, the books are on the shelf, and they have lost none of their bite.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing