Marjane Satrapi, creator of 'Persépolis', Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2024 | Culture | EUROtoday

An Iranian woman seems forward, arms crossed. She wears the veil, and a sure firmness in her eyes. Just two vignettes later, we see exalted women and men, protesting with raised fists: the Islamic Revolution begins. Those drawings, which started within the 12 months 2000 Persepolis (Reservoir Books), they modified the historical past of that little woman, of the graphic novel and, maybe, even of Iran. So a lot in order that for years Marjane Satrapi (Rasth, 54 years outdated) continued to be requested to painting that younger lady, to which she responded many times: “she has grown up.” She has turn into a lady. Comic legend. Filmmaker. Franco-Iranian. Fierce opponent of the regime of her nation. And now, the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, as introduced this Tuesday by the muse that awards the awards.

The jury highlights Satrapi as “an essential voice for the defense of human rights and freedom, a symbol of civic commitment led by women,” and describes her as “one of the most influential people in the dialogue between cultures and generations.” and do not forget that in “Persepolis “It exemplarily embodies the search for a more just and inclusive world.” That is to say, the award acknowledges many issues on the similar time, precisely what Satrapi's works characterize. Above all, the expertise of a narrator able to studying and mastering new codecs. She had barely any expertise, other than having solely been on the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts for a short while, when she constructed her masterpiece, a milestone within the historical past of comics “only comparable to the Maus by Art Spiegelman”, based on its Spanish writer, Reservoir Books. Neither did he know a lot about cinema when he let himself be satisfied to adapt Persepolis to the display. It obtained the primary nomination by a feminine creator for greatest animated movie in Oscar historical past. But the Princess of Asturias additionally exalts the braveness of a voice at all times able to shout for justice and towards oppressive energy, in her statements and interviews, as in her artwork.

So a lot in order that he not too long ago returned to comics for the primary time in years to coordinate Women. Life. Freedom, anthology the place she has introduced collectively stars like Paco Roca and Joan Sfarr – a type of “international comic brigade”, in her definition – with Iranian authors like herself or Shabnam Adiban, to assist the protests which might be shaking their nation and denounce the repression that residents undergo. All for the reason that demise, on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained by the morality police for not carrying the necessary veil for ladies in Iran. Satrapi has insisted a number of occasions that there’s just one phrase to clarify what she boils in her nation. Neither “revolt” nor “movement”, however “the world's first feminist revolution.”

She was equally clear in qualifying the opposite facet. “This regime does not love Iran. They don't dress like Iranians or talk like Iranians. “Iran gives them the hard time,” he informed EL PAÍS in November. “They are a minority and do not represent even 15%, and among them are the religious lunatics, but also a large part of people with economic interests,” he added. Therefore, his selection in one other advanced debate is clear: there are Iranian artists who’ve stood up towards the Government and have paid a value for it, similar to director Jafar Panahi, sentenced to 6 years in jail for anti-government propaganda. regime. Others, like filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, have been accused of profiling for years. Satrapi has belonged to the primary camp for many years. Somehow, with Persepolis, He even confirmed the way in which.

“I sold millions and I don't know how many hundreds of conferences I gave. Did I change something? What do I know? Did I arouse people's curiosity? Yes. I contributed a little. Just a little bit, although that's the only way to change the world,” she mirrored in November. Because, on the similar time, Persepolis It contained different basic keys for Satrapi: the macro story, of repression, jail and deaths, together with the every day life and perspective of a teen who longs for freedom as a lot as a Kim Wilde cassette on the black market. A practical portrait of the nation and its individuals, removed from the frames of “hills and donkeys” or the picture of a nation “trapped in dark times” that Western festivals search for in Iranian artwork, as lamented a month in the past by The Guardian. But, as well as, for Satrapi there’s one other key phrase, one of the crucial repeated in his interviews: “decency.”

The creator was recognized internationally for this graphic novel, which was later tailored as an animated function movie in 2007 with Satrapi herself as director, along with Vincent Paronnaud, and which received the Jury Prize on the Cannes pageant. In Persepolisan autobiographical work primarily based on black and white vignettes, the creator narrates her childhood in Tehran through the Islamic Revolution that, in 1979, overthrew the Shah of Persia and raised Ayatollah Khomeini to energy, till the start of her grownup life along with her arrival in Europe.

Among Satrapi's different works is Embroidery (Norma, 2003) which chronicles the lives of Iranian girls (nominated for the perfect album award on the 2004 Angoulême Comic Festival), and later, Chicken with plums (Norma, 2004), which received exactly that award. This work narrates the final eight days of the lifetime of a relative of Satrapi named Nasser Ali, a widely known participant of tar, the normal Iranian lute. Among his movies is The voices (2014), a mixture of horror and comedy a few man who suffers from schizophrenia and tries to cover his hallucinations, or Radioactive (2020) centered on the lifetime of the radioactivity scientist Marie Curie and primarily based on a graphic novel by Lauren Redniss.

Satrapi's household, rich and progressive, initially sympathized with the plural Revolution that was orchestrated towards the Shah, however when it was dominated by the Islamist sectors it led to a theocratic regime that restricted particular person freedoms, imposed the veil, repressed the opposition and launched into a warfare with Iraq in 1980, at all times beneath the surveillance of the Revolutionary Guards. In 1984, when Satrapi was 14, her dad and mom despatched her to Europe to finish a secular schooling in a rustic with out repression. She began on the French Lycée in Vienna, after finishing her research there she started to review Fine Arts in Iran, however it could not take lengthy for her to go to France. Since then she has resided in Paris.

47 candidates from 15 nationalities had been competing for the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, the second of the eight worldwide awards convened yearly by the Princess of Asturias Foundation and which this 12 months attain their XLIV version. The first prize awarded for this version was for Arts, which went to the determine of the Catalan musician Joan Manuel Serrat. The Communication and Humanities jury, chaired by the philologist Víctor García de la Concha, included names such because the thinker Adela Cortina, the artwork critic Adela Cortina, the director of the Prado Museum Miguel Falomir, the educational Taciana Fisac, the author Carme Riera or the journalists Alma Guillermoprieto, Luis María Ansón, Rosa María Calaf, Álex Grijelmo or Gabriela Cañas.