Homework: Film Production and Cultural Exchange at Kanoon

University of Toronto

Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies

The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Lecture Series
in collaboration with
The Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation

presents


Homework: Film Production and Cultural Exchange at Kanoon,
(Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), 1965-1989

Simran Bhalla
Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies
University of Southern California 

Abstract: 

Kanoon, or the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, was founded in the mid-1960s as one of several governmental organizations established to grow Iran’s cultural production. This presentation considers how technocratic national development agendas resulted in a flourishing of modernist and experimental cinema at Kanoon. I examine animated, non-fiction, and fiction films, including a selection of early films by Abbas Kiarostami. This paper demonstrates that Kanoon films, which were for or about children, laid the formal groundwork for Iran’s well-documented humanist film tradition. However, these films simultaneously advanced an elitist state’s ideologies of modernity.