Israel Matzav

Top 10 movies banned in the Middle East and a surprise

Here's a great article on the top ten movies that are banned in the Middle East. I urge you to read it.

As it happens, once again this week, I need to be out every night. So I have something for your entertainment. The first movie on the list in that article is a classic called Not Without My Daughter.

1991’s Not Without My Daughter, starring Sally Field and Alfred Molina, is a movie that probably no studio exec would dare “greenlight” today, thanks to a stultifying Hollywood environment of political correctness [8]. Released only a few days before the Gulf War began, and based on one of the two “most hated” books [9] in Iran (the other being Salman Rushdie’s infamously blasphemous The Satanic Verses), it depicts the daring real-life escape of American citizen Betty Mahmoody and her daughter from Iran.

Mahmoody was being kept a virtual prisoner by her husband, who beat and threatened her, and by his strictly devout family, who pressured her to conform to the life of a submissive Muslim wife. Though some Iranian characters in the film were treated sympathetically, Not Without My Daughter earned a ban from the Iranian leadership for embarrassing the mullahs and for exposing their oppression and the grim reality of life for women under sharia law.

As it happens, someone has just posted the entire movie online, and you are going to get to watch it while I am out every night this week (class Sunday, wedding Monday, meeting and wedding Tuesday, Bar Mitzvah Wednesday and Bar Mitzvah Thursday). Here's Part 1.

Let's go to the videotape.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:23 PM