Film Review: Intermarriage, Iranian Jewish Style

I’ve lived within the greater Los Angeles Jewish Los Angeles for over 30 years, and in that time, I’ve seen how some views toward Iranian Jews have changed while others have remained stagnant: We’re too traditional/we’re defying traditions. We’re too Persian/we’re becoming too assimilated. We’re all educated doctors/we all take the “easy” road, attend community college, and go into business with our parents.

However, one of the most consistent, but lesser known views that frames the whole of the Iranian-American Jewish experience is this: we’re either too human or we’re not human enough.

When we’re accused of being too human, we’re too loud, tribal and boisterous. Our over-the-top weddings are obsessively devoted to love and life. Our throw-yourself-on-the-coffin funerals are too obsessively devoted to loss and death. Our trauma from upheaval, persecution and war back in Iran color our experiences too much. We love (and hate) too fiercely.

When we don’t seem to participate enough in the human experience, we’re oppressed, mindless robots, controlled by the inflexibly ancient traditions of our parents and our culture. We don’t love freely, because our community has forbidden it. We forgo career passions, because they were never even an option. We don’t join our Ashkenazi friends at a Friday night movie because our familial overlords demand our presence at the weekly Shabbat dinner table. Our exclusivity has kept us from truly knowing what it is to live in America, with all the freedoms of love and life that it offers.

Recently, as I watched a short film about the fictional struggles of one Iranian-American Jewish family as the backbone of their faith and sacrifice nearly crumbles, I realized that neither characterization of our community is entirely accurate.

The 25-minute film, titled “Over My Dead Body” (2020) was written, directed and produced by Meital Cohen Navarro and had its North American premiere last month at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. Next week, the film will have its West Coast premiere at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival (March 9-14), though viewers may purchase tickets and watch it remotely.

Cohen Navarro, who was born and raised in Ramat HaSharon, Israel, is second-generation Moroccan and Yemenite. After decades abroad in Africa, including South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she served as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper, Ma’ariv, she moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to pursue filmmaking, and began meeting local Iranian Jews.

“Most of the young Persian Jews I met married other Persian Jews,” she said in an interview with the Journal. “In Israel, it’s so different. Mizrahim don’t only marry each other. Neither do Ashkenazim. And no one really cares, at least not anymore.”

But Cohen Navarro immediately understood the important role of both faith and culture in more traditional communities such as those of Iranians, due to her own Yemenite and Moroccan roots. The tension between appeasing a traditional family and venturing into the seemingly dangerous expanse of one’s own desires was so palpable that she decided to bring such tension to life on film.

“Over My Dead Body” chronicles the response of an Iranian Jewish family in Beverly Hills to the news that their daughter, Isfahan (played by Nakta Pahlevan), has decided to marry a Muslim Iranian, Kambiz (played by Ash Dadvand). To say that the family is dismayed is an understatement; at times, it seems they’re anticipating a funeral rather than a wedding.

For most of the film, viewers are naturally inclined to sympathize with Isfahan (especially if they were born or raised in America and consider themselves more progressive). But most Iranian Jewish viewers, even young ones, will immediately understand the family’s painful, albeit seemingly over dramatic response, even if they disagree with it.

Just when we imagine that Cohen Navarro has only depicted Isfahan as a tragic victim of tribalism and yes, even prejudice, against Muslims, the director surprises viewers by offering a much-needed empathetic avenue into the painful background that colors why her family (especially her father) is so adamantly against her decision.

The family’s older children, Ezra and Sarah (played by Afshin Katanchi and Mahsa Shamsa, respectively), also are bewildered by Isfahan’s announcement, but some of the most powerful portrayals of familial pain are captured through exceptional performances by Bahram Vatanparast, who plays Isfahan’s father, Parviz, and Mary Apick, who plays her mother, Rachel. Iranian viewers of a certain generation will recognize Vatanparast and Apick as famed Iranian actors of the 1970s, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced them and most other artists to flee the country.

“The film really highlights an important issue that creates so much distance between people,” Vatanparast told the Journal. “And we have to ask yourselves, ‘Why?’ Why do things have to be like this? Why do there have to be such differences between people? We’re all human.”

Vatanparast, who was born Muslim (but is ardently secular), admitted than when one of his daughters married an American man, “there were many initial cultural barriers.” However, he wasn’t able to identify with the pain of the character whom he played so well.

“As an actor, I have to understand what the director wants, and put my entire being into it,” he said. “My sentiments in the film about religion reflect what Meital [Cohen Navarro] wanted as part of the character. They’re not my own.”

The cast primarily consists of Muslim Iranian actors, with the exception of Apick, who is Christian, and Shamsa, who is Jewish.

After the revolution, Vatanparast no longer was able to act in films, particularly alongside female actresses. “The regime brought in their own people for everything, including writing and censorship,” he reflected. So Vatanparast performed in theatrical plays until those, too, were banned. He came to the United States in 1984. He fears returning to Iran due to his acting career and as well as his secular beliefs.

“I love the Jewish people,” he said. “It was they who helped keep Iranian culture and arts alive. Without Iranian Jews, we couldn’t have kept many of the arts that traditional Islam, for over a thousand years, considered haram (forbidden).”

Pahlevan plays the starring role of a struggling daughter beautifully, in no small part because she related deeply with her character. The actress grew up in Tehran, and while her maternal family are devout Muslims, her paternal family is secular. In Iran, she dated a young Muslim man who was very religious. “His father had served as an ambassador for the Islamic Republic of Iran and was heavily involved with the regime,” she told the Journal. “I wasn’t religious enough, so the young man’s mother forced us to break up.”

At 21, Pahlevan left Iran, after receiving a scholarship to study biomedical engineering at the University of Birmingham, where she also received her masters degree. But she always had a passion for theater and the arts. Pahlevan moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and began taking classes in filmmaking, editing, writing and acting. Her family was less than enthused.

“We had so many fights,” she said. “They were okay if I directed, but not acted. Like many Iranians, even those in America, they thought acting corrupts a woman. ‘Be an engineer and keep your acting as a hobby,’ my mother told me. Even my brother got involved, trying to talk me into my senses, just as the character of the brother gets involved in the film.”

When Pahlevan read for the role of Isfahan, she felt she was reading about herself. “Because of everything in my own life, I really sympathized with that character,” she said. “I can feel her. I understand her. After the audition, I got into my car and cried. ‘They have to give me the role!’ I said to myself. No one can tell the story better than I! It’s my story.”

When Pahlevan read for the role of Isfahan, she felt she was reading about herself.

Pahlevan believes that most Iranians, regardless of faith, will relate to the film. “In Iran, many parents from different cities or tribes often don’t let their kids marry each other,” she said.

The only hardship that Pahlevan faced was connecting with the character of a young woman who had been raised in the United States. “In researching the film, I realized that young Iranian women in America don’t talk about their pain enough with their parents, so they’re extremely shocked when their family doesn’t accept something about them.”

When asked if she was concerned that the film would portray Iranian Jews as close-minded, Cohen Navarro said, “It’s a Jewish conflict, not just an Iranian Jewish conflict. It could easily have been my family, a Moroccan Jewish family,or Yemenites, or any others of Jewish origin. This is a difficult subject, and I hope I shed a little more light on that.”

She continued, “I believe you do see both sides of the story. Life is not not black or white. Jews are like many others around the world who want to be part of their own roots and culture. I totally get it. Jews aren’t the exception, I have learned that “Over My Dead Body” is the story of many people from all over the world.”

In fact, when Cohen Navarro asked viewers from around the world to watch the film and participate in focus groups, the response was nearly universal: “At the end of the screening, almost everyone said, ‘This is my story,’” she said, adding, “A Syrian Sunni said she had the exact same experience trying to marry outside of her faith; a Muslim friend from Pakistan said her family would have frowned upon her marrying someone from a different tribe. By engaging with international audiences, I was reminded of the importance of film as a vehicle of storytelling; of having a community and an individual’s voice and vision heard.  No genre can move, depict, persuade, or impress as much as film.”

Pahlevan calls Cohen Navarro a “superwoman who does it all” (including self-funding the film). As most of the film is in Persian (with English subtitles), Cohen Navarro hired a tutor and listened to hundreds of hours of pre-recorded language lessons to learn Persian. There was also a Persian-language translator on set. She hopes to screen the film in Israel this year.

“Over My Dead Body” will undoubtedly invite dialogue about the Iranian Jewish experience amid the backdrop American assimilation. Yes, we are a tribal community because we were forced to live together in the Jewish quarters (or ghettos) of Iran for years, lest they contaminated Muslims with our “nejasat,” or ritual impurity. And yes, we’re traumatized by our former second class status (and sometimes, outright persecution) in a country that’s 99% Shi’a Muslim and, for the past 42 years, has been an official theocracy.

Intermarriage between Jews and Muslims was such a rarity in Iran that we came to the United States and were shocked to our cores if our sons and daughters wanted to marry Ashkenazi Jews. Now that’s an intermarriage, we chuckled. And many of us truly do connect deeply with our Jewish identities — the one identity we carried on our backs after we escaped Iran, never to be officially Iranian (on paper) again, and waiting to be something, anything — American, Canadian, German, etc. What if there are those of us who truly love being Jewish and who believe a non-Jewish partner, even one we love deeply, will never really know us in the way of the soul?

This last question plagued me as I watched Isfahan defend her choice to her family. Yes, she loves Kambiz deeply. But what, if anything, do we know about her feelings about Judaism and her own connection (or lack thereof) to her Jewish identity? Is there any part of her that embraces her Jewishness as her own?

Thankfully, Cohen Navarro shot “Over My Dead Body,” as a proof-of-concept for a television series she has developed, which means viewers will hopefully learn more about Isfahan’s journey as well as her inner struggles.

“It’s my hope that, through Isfahan’s devastation, parents will see the toll taken on their own children, especially the next generation of women,” Cohen Navarro said. “And, with any luck, the younger generation will see their parents’ equally heartbreaking cultural challenges and embrace their fear of losing what has always been their world. Love is difficult, and even more so when you must choose.”

“Over My Dead Body” premieres at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival March 9-14. Tickets to watch the film remotely may be found here. Meital Cohen Navarro may be found on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby