Banned in Iran, a filmmaker finds inspiration in her mother for 'The Persian Version'

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. This is our first show since Hamas' shocking and horrific invasion of Israel, which has led to all-out war. We will be talking about the war and what led to it. But today we're going to proceed with the interview we'd already planned to broadcast. Today's interview is with an Iranian American filmmaker. Her work has made it unsafe for her to return to Iran. We recorded our interview last week.

You won't be shocked to hear that a feature film about the underground youth culture in Iran and two young women sexually drawn to each other was banned in Iran. The film's writer and director, Maryam Keshavarz, was banned from ever returning to Iran. She's the daughter of Iranian immigrants. That film, called "Circumstance," was released in 2011 and had the distinction of becoming the top black market DVD in Iran that year. In the U.S., it won the Audience Award at Sundance. This year she became the first director to win the Sundance Audience Award a second time when she received it for her new film, "The Persian Version," which she wrote and directed. It also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

"The Persian Version" is a fiction film, but it's based on the story of Keshavarz's life. Here's a few things about her that are very similar to her main character, Layla. Keshavarz identifies as bisexual. Her parents first came to the U.S. in 1967 as part of a program recruiting doctors from other countries to care for patients in underserved communities because there was a scarcity of doctors here. Her father set up a practice in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. During her childhood, Keshavarz spent summers in Iran and attended second grade there during the height of the Islamization of the schools. She managed to smuggle in cassettes of Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper and Prince, which got people dancing at parties behind closed doors.

As Keshavarz got older, the cultural differences between her and her mother put a strain on their relationship. But relatively recently, a scandalous secret from her mother's past was revealed, which enabled Keshavarz to see her mother in a new way. About half of the new movie is the story of Layla's mother growing up in Iran and entering into an arranged marriage at the age of 13. Her first child came soon after.

Maryam Keshavarz, welcome to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on your film. I want to start with being banned in Iran. So your first film, "Circumstance," was the most popular banned film in Iran in the year it came out, 2011. Does that carry a lot of status in Iran, and how do they even measure that? It's not like they can do it at the checkout counter.

MARYAM KESHAVARZ: It's funny. I meet people all the time who have seen the film underground. Even my editor - one of my editors, when I was interviewing him, he couldn't believe he was meeting me. He said, oh, we all watched that when we were in university. It was, like, the biggest underground film. And I knew it was a big deal when my uncle, who was very religious, evidently had sat down his whole family, not knowing what it was about, and they all watched it together.

GROSS: They made it through the whole thing?

KESHAVARZ: That's the thing I like about Iranians. You know, they might have different political opinions, but they do like movies. So evidently, he watched the whole thing.

GROSS: One of the many things you have in common with your main character, Layla, in your new film is that she smuggles in cassettes of Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Prince. So you know the importance of films that are banned, but you also know the importance of getting good music - like, good American music into Iran. So how did you smuggle it in as a child?

KESHAVARZ: I would have a lot of requests. All my cousins, who were the only part of the family that lived in America, so my cousins wanted me to bring smuggled tapes. So I would stick it in my underwear - a Michael Jackson or Cyndi Lauper - and because it was an Islamic country, there were never going to check - they don't check girls bodies, typically. So if it was on my body, I had a pretty good shot of getting it through. It was all about how to walk naturally when you have cassettes in your undies. It did help to borrow one of my brother's underoos. Those, like, higher-waisted ones so you can fit more tapes in there.

GROSS: You need...

KESHAVARZ: But...

GROSS: ...Good elastic for this work.

KESHAVARZ: (Laughter) But the thing is, I was asked to smuggle all types of things because it became banned. It's not - remember; it's not like you can do digital downloads at that time. It was all - you know, it was all old school. So I'd have to actually bring physical copies of tapes and - or, like, they wanted Cosmo or Bridal Magazine. They wanted to know how to get done up for the new season of when people were getting married. So it just, you know, whatever I could tape onto my body or whatever I could, like, safely bring in. But sometimes I would get scared 'cause you have to gauge if they're going to bust you. So I would always be very vigilant at reading people, and was this the time I was going to get pulled over?

So sometimes I would get scared and go to the bathroom right before customs and break the tapes and shove it down the toilet. It just depended how I could read the situation. But often, yeah, I mean, that moment of getting home and pulling out those tapes, it was victory for everybody. It was glorious. And then, you know, I smuggled tapes back to - I mean, the funny thing is, I don't know if you know about Googoosh. She was one of our greatest singers. She was like Madonna meets Barbra Streisand. And she had been stuck in Iran until 2000. And her music was so big before the '60s, and most of those tapes were in Iran. So then I would bring those tapes from Iran into America. And you see in the scene where they're dancing in the Brooklyn brownstone to Googoosh, those were tapes that I had brought from Iran back to America.

GROSS: I'm glad you mentioned Googoosh because her music just amazed me. I'd never heard of her before. And there was a scene set in Iran where the newly married 13-year-old person playing your mother in flashback goes to her first concert with her new husband, who's 22. She's 13. And the person they hear is Googoosh. And this is in the '60s. And the music is so good. I'll add to your description of Madonna meets Barbra Streisand. I'll add meets maybe Edith Piaf.

KESHAVARZ: Yes. Definitely. That's a good - that's a great observation.

GROSS: And so why don't we just take a pause here and just hear that music? It's so good. And this is a Persian song. And so this is the song that they hear in concert.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MA BEH HAM MOHTAJIM")

GOOGOOSH: (Singing in Persian).

GROSS: OK. That was the singer Googoosh, an Iranian singer. And my guest is Maryam Keshavarz, whose new movie is called "The Persian Version." And you'll hear that song in the movie.

KESHAVARZ: I love that song. It's so beautiful.

GROSS: It's so beautiful. So in your new film, Layla is divorced from her wife - recently divorced. Her mother disapproves of lesbian relationships. It's quite taboo for her. So was it frustrating for you growing up in a country where, like, Stonewall had already happened? And did you have - what kind of ceremony did you have?

KESHAVARZ: We, funny enough, got married at the bank because we found out that we can get health care if we - there was no marriage then, it was domestic partnership.

GROSS: Right.

KESHAVARZ: And we lived in - I was at U of M doing - in grad school, and we were like, oh, we can - we should get married. We can get health care. So we invited some friends to the bank and then we had a little reception at the queer club in Ann Arbor. So it was very low key.

GROSS: So it must be frustrating to live in a country where you could do that, but your mother's mindset was still from Iran, where it was, like, totally taboo.

KESHAVARZ: It was an ongoing negotiation of my life, and not only in those subjects. It's - you know, when you come from another country to the U.S., you try to keep your culture, your language, and it becomes frozen in time. Even the Persian I speak, people will laugh sometimes 'cause I sound like an older lady. It's like Farsi from - it's Shirazi - my family's from Shiraz - from the '60s. And to this day when I speak to people - I remember when I met Asghar Farhadi - his grandparents are from Shiraz - he was blown away that I spoke still the old type of Shirazi. And I think that's interesting. You come to a country, and you so desperately want to preserve your culture, but it's a culture frozen in time. And I think we have to understand that culture evolves with the new cultural mores. And so that's something that I certainly have pushed and my brothers have pushed my immediate family to do. And I think it's a growing - growing pains of changing. And is there a way to keep your culture, but also to continue to evolve?

GROSS: That's such an interesting observation.

KESHAVARZ: And I think Iran is such a super - I know what we see in the news, but most of the people are very, very modern and very progressive. You know, I grew up in America going to Persian school, going to - I grew up as a Muslim, going to the mosque, growing up very spiritual in terms of religion. All my cousins that live in Iran - they're complete atheists, and they laugh at the fact that I know anything about religion. So I do think it's...

GROSS: That's crazy.

KESHAVARZ: Yeah.

GROSS: That's so funny. Yeah.

KESHAVARZ: It's not what people think. And I think because in Iran people have been forced with religion, they wholeheartedly - most people reject it completely as a part of their culture. They have an aversion to it. Whereas because I had the freedom of either choosing to practice or not practice, I was very connected to my grandfather, who was a Sufi poet. So I saw religion not in the same way that they did, obviously, because it was not something forced upon me. So it is interesting what we think about Iran.

I think you look at the girls there and the women there, and there, the women led revolution. That doesn't come out of nowhere. You know, that comes out of a highly educated - more than 50% of the university are women. They know their rights. They are connected to the world. That probably couldn't happen to that scale, like, in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or something. But you have a culture that's very educated, very in tune with their right - with what their rights are, and they have been battling. You know, I went to my first Women's Day protest in Iran in 2006, and you see incredible films coming from Iran, theater, our poetry, I think. That struggle has been ongoing. And I'm so grateful that now we have a voice. We can use our voices abroad to help amplify their struggle.

GROSS: You know, your movie really directly connects to that in the making in the sense that your movie wrapped just a few weeks before the protest.

KESHAVARZ: Isn't that crazy? Yes.

GROSS: Yeah. The protests surrounding Mahsa Amini's death while in the custody of the morality police allegedly for violating the dress code. And now that the film is released just after the one anniversary of her death, a new morality law has been passed for people who violate the dress code. They can be imprisoned up to 10 years.

KESHAVARZ: And yet I have so many friends and family and cousins and people who worked on the film who go without hijab. They actually go - they still don't wear the hijab. They don't care. It's such a thing that they can't...

GROSS: How does that happen?

KESHAVARZ: There's - if you - there's like - my brother was just there. He said maybe close to half of the women are not covering their hair, and it's such a mass - it continues to be a mass protest. The thing is that they can't arrest half the population, half of the women. It's - they're trying - they're slowly clamping down. But I'm just shocked at how much the women are pushing back.

GROSS: Now, I read that you've been imprisoned. Was that for participating in protests?

KESHAVARZ: I was arrested making "The Color Of Love."

GROSS: That was your documentary about three generations of people...

KESHAVARZ: Yes.

GROSS: ...And how they saw love. Yeah.

KESHAVARZ: And that experience was - inspired seeing that happen in "Circumstance." I was lucky to get out. Like in "Circumstance," I had connections to be able to get out of being arrested. But it certainly was eye-opening. And at that time, I actually had, you know, permits and everything to shoot. But the reason I made this film, it was very much about all the things I face as an American in the U.S. I never, ever saw anything that represented anything close to my culture. To me, I felt very alienated growing up and desperate to see something on the screen that represented our community, our life. And I think it was - one of the biggest impetuses for me to even make this film was because - I grew up in post-'80s here, a hostage crisis, being terrorized by our neighbors, the same neighbors that we were friends with. And when the hostage crisis happened, we became enemy No. 1.

GROSS: When you say terrorize, what happened?

KESHAVARZ: Oh, they would break our windows, slash our tires, beat us up.

GROSS: This was in New Jersey?

KESHAVARZ: This - it was in New York. I moved to New Jersey in high school. And my brothers probably got much more of the brunt of it 'cause they were older. But it was certainly a very, you know, scary time for us to be Iranian in America. And obviously, the whole - all of the villainization of Muslims across the board over the years, it was a tough pill to swallow. And, you know, the reason I became a filmmaker was when 9/11 happened, I decided to leave academia. And I wanted to go into media 'cause I felt like it was time to shake things up from the inside. But I think so much of my impetus to become a filmmaker is from my experience here in the U.S. as an immigrant.

I just didn't realize until much later in my life that I could be a director. I had never seen many - I hadn't seen any women directors. I knew they were - Penny Marshall - the woman who did "Big" - was a woman who was a director. It wasn't until I saw a film series when I was a student at Northwestern called Films from Iran at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they brought directors, and two of the four directors they brought were women. And I said, oh, my God. Can you be a woman and direct a film? And ironically, it was the Iranian woman that I saw first in that position. So...

GROSS: What made you think that a movie could change people's opinions or changed the narrative?

KESHAVARZ: You know, my parents, I remember when they saw the film "Philadelphia." So my dad was a doctor in Bed-Stuy. He treated, you know, during the crack epidemic and the AIDS epidemic. And I remember we watched - as a family, we saw "Philadelphia," and it really moved...

GROSS: And that was a story where Tom Hanks played somebody who had AIDS and had to deal with all the discrimination against people with AIDS and also had to deal with the fact that there was no real medical long-term solution for it...

KESHAVARZ: But more importantly, that they were a gay couple, right?

GROSS: Yes, of course. Yes.

KESHAVARZ: And that was the thing, is, you know, obviously, my father treated a lot of people as patients, but to see this sort of humanization of a queer couple was really eye-opening to my parents. And I remember my mom saying, of course, gay people are just like any other couple, they go through so much. And it was her first consciousness. It was a long process, but I think it was such an important one for her, not just to understand - obviously, we knew about the AIDs crisis, having my dad being a doctor. But really, to humanize what gay couples went through specifically, I think, was really a first step. And so for me, I realized, oh, wow, you know, that is really a way to change people's minds. Cinema could be the way.

GROSS: All right. Well, let's take a short break here, then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE GROUP'S "IOWA TAKEN")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." It's a fiction film, but it's inspired by Keshavarz's life and her mother's. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Iran in 1967. Keshavarz grew up in New York and New Jersey.

I want to tell a little bit of your mother's story. She was married in an arranged marriage at age 13. That's so young. And I look at her - (laughter) I look at the actress, who was 14 when she shot the movie. And I think, oh, to be in a marriage then and to have to leave seventh grade to go with her husband, who is 22 and is a new doctor, to go to a village that she's never been to before, it's just remarkable to think about. So did your mother have any say in this at all?

KESHAVARZ: I mean, in that era, they really didn't. They didn't even have a concept that they had a right to say no. But I think when they came to ask for her hand in marriage, obviously my mother really pushed against that. She really, like in the film, wanted to finish school. But I think she made a calculated decision that at least my father was someone very educated and that he had aspirations, maybe one day, to go abroad. And my mom was such a - she was so naive. You know, even when she boarded the plane to come to America, she had never seen an escalator. But in her mind, she thought, oh, my God, I'll be able to fly to America. And she had this - all these fantasies of even flying. So in her girlish way, she felt that that was the best compromise.

GROSS: Did you always know about the arranged marriage?

KESHAVARZ: Of course. I think that was something that was kind of a strain on my - I was very close to my grandparents, as you can see in the film. And it was always a strain - sort of a strain between me and my grandparents when I always questioned how they could do that. And again, it was the norm at the time, but I never felt that was a good enough answer. I always had a little bit of - how would you say it? I love them. But I also had a - I try not to judge them, but I did have a part of me that felt a small distance because of that decision that changed my mother's life. But so much of this film has been trying to understand people's decisions not now, in 2023, but at the time, you know, thinking about my mom at 14, or my grandmother herself was only in her 30s when her daughter was getting married. So just thinking about it from their perspective, from their - what was norm in their culture.

GROSS: You know, this may sound clueless to you, but watching the movie, the grandmother is such a sympathetic character. And I hadn't been thinking like, yes, and she's also the woman behind the arranged marriage...

KESHAVARZ: Right (laughter). It's so complicated, right?

GROSS: ...That got your mother married off at age 13, you know?

KESHAVARZ: You love her so much now, and it's - yeah.

GROSS: Yeah, and it's like, I can't fathom how you would do that to your daughter.

KESHAVARZ: Right, and there's so many layers to people. And there's so many reasons at a specific moment in time and culture that people make those decisions. It's hard for us - I don't think it's right for us in the present time to go back and to try to judge it from our present perspective. I always try to - as a writer, I try to think of it from that specific moment. And that was a big - that was an exercise for me, you know, to think of what it was like, for instance, for my mother at 14, all those moments. And to think that that same person, only 25 years later, gives birth to me, you know, and all of what my expectations are as an American and how she has to reconcile that life that she had with this new life. And I give her a lot of credit for evolving and changing and finding ways for us to remain a family even though we're very different, all of us in our family. But there was still a way that she kept us all together.

GROSS: Well, let's leave the story here for a moment because we have to take another short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." We recorded our interview last week. We'll hear more of it after we take a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GOOGOOSH SONG, "HEJRAT")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." It's a fiction film inspired by Keshavarz's life and her mother's life. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1967. Keshavarz grew up in New York City and New Jersey. Like the character in the film, she identifies as bisexual, which her parents considered taboo and unacceptable. About half of "The Persian Version" is the story of Layla's mother growing up in Iran and entering into an arranged marriage at age 13. Her new husband was 22. Her first child came soon after. Keshavarz's 2011 film, "Circumstance," about youth culture in Iran and two young women sexually drawn to each other, was banned in Iran and resulted in Keshavarz being unable to ever return. That film and her new film won the Audience Award at Sundance, making her the first director to win that award twice.

So let me get to the scandal. And because it's kind of a spoiler for your film, I'll only say part of it, but part of the scandal involves that your mother found out that your father had taken a second wife from the village that they had moved to so he could practice medicine there. And the story is even more complicated than that, but that will probably suffice in the interview, 'cause I want to respect your film and the way the story is told in the film. But when you found out that by the time your mother was 15, she learned while she was giving birth to her second child, who didn't survive, while that was happening, during that period, she found out that, you know, your father had taken a second wife who she knew. When you found out this story, what was your reaction? Did it change your understanding of your mother and your father?

KESHAVARZ: For me, it made me realize how complicated relationships are, particularly long-term relationships. When we say relationships are complicated, that's an understatement. I think it made me realize how much you can overcome with time, I think, and the right philosophy and with essentially having to - right? - you're forced to survive. And so you can organize your life in a way that's miserable or you can organize your life in a way that's positive and joyful and embraces difference and finds a way to move forward. And I credit both my parents with doing that, finding a way to take the mistakes that they've made - and certainly my father would agree that he had made mistakes. He was also so young and naive. I think it's a life lesson. You know, we should not only be judged by our mistakes, we should be judged by how we deal with those mistakes and how we move forward from them. For me, that was a big lesson.

And also was - wanted to know who this other woman was. She was such a figure for both of my parents. She was like a maternal figure. She was the older woman. So in the film, I think I try to portray her very sympathetically, or at least very realistically, not as quote-unquote, "the other woman," but as a woman who was very educated, who was sent to this rural village and who also had her own dreams and aspirations. And, you know, as a woman in that era, it was difficult across the board. So I really try to think about it in those terms.

GROSS: Do you think your mother ever forgave your father, and did you get the sense that they loved each other?

KESHAVARZ: It's a good question. I find - as - definitely, my mother forgave my father over the years, and they had a very interesting relationship, particularly after my dad had a heart transplant. He became very emotional. I think, yeah, I think my mother forgave my father. I think they loved each other in a way that we don't understand in the West, I think, because we base our relationships on very different ideas. I think they based their relationship on shared belief system and raising a family and that being - the family and the raising of the family being the most important thing and everything else sublimated to that. And I think they certainly both did that and they cared for each other in a way that they could. They were very different personalities, but they had their own spheres. And maybe why it worked is that in our culture, like, the men and women, they have their own groups of friends, and they look to their friends as ways to be fulfilled, also. So I guess the short of it is in their own way, yes.

GROSS: Is your father still alive?

KESHAVARZ: No. He died many, many years ago, actually. And that's a part in the film that's fiction. My dad died years before I ever had a child. So it was - but, you know, getting back to the film, I really wanted a film to be full of joy and fun and life of my immigrant culture here. So I didn't want the father to die in the story, so I wanted him to live.

GROSS: Right. So let's leave this story again for a moment so we can take another break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." It's a fiction film inspired by Keshavarz's life and her mother's life. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Iran in 1967.

Your mother really transformed her life after she got to the U.S. And the way it's told in the film, you know, your father has serious heart problems and needs a heart transplant, and your mother, to pay for the hospital bills, needs to find a way to get an income to continue raising the family of you and your many brothers.

KESHAVARZ: My brothers.

GROSS: Yeah. So how did she become - like, what did she become? Did she become a realtor like in the movie?

KESHAVARZ: Yeah. All of that is true. And the lore goes that she was, you know, totally devastated. She looks up, and she sees this poster somewhere in the city. It says 1-800-REALTOR. And she calls the number, just like in the movie, and finds out that she can make a lot of money. She's very naive. Like, I can make a lot of money being a realtor. So she calls the number, but she realizes she needs to have a high school diploma. So she concurrently goes to night school and gets her high school diploma while she is taking her real estate classes. And she corners the market on - focusing on immigrants who want to, you know, buy homes. And that was a big deal.

Like, at the time, you know, there was a lot of racism in real estate. And my mom would set up her office perfect for people that had a lot of kids and immigrants. There would be snacks and TV. And she bought this, like, really amazing - when she got more successful - amazing van that had, like, a VCR in it for the - people who had kids, you know, immigrants who had kids. They couldn't - they didn't afford babysitters. So they would bring the kids. And she would - she really focused and marketed towards immigrants. And she became wildly successful.

And then from there, she was an entrepreneur. And when we lived in New Jersey, she saw there was an area called Edison, N.J., that was completely boarded up in the late - in the early '90s. And so she started to buy some of those boarded-up places. And when she had heard that there was problems with Indian businesses - I think it was in Jersey City - she brought those folks over to her new shops and started essentially what became Little India. Those were on Oak Tree Road, which everyone - anyone knows - you go to anywhere in the world, you say Edison or Oak Tree Road, it's synonymous with Little India. So, you know, she had the vision to start that. And she gave people a great deal when they first moved in, like no rent for so many months to start their business. But that's her - that's how she was able to - you know, we went from not having any money growing up to all of us getting to go to Ivy League schools, so not bad.

GROSS: She just seems like an amazing person.

KESHAVARZ: She is truly the - and she was always good at math earlier in her life - and she wanted to finish school. She wanted to be a math major. So she was able - someone who never finished seventh grade was able to get a high school degree and use her math skills and use her interpersonal skills and understand what it meant to be an immigrant and have your kids and not have a babysitter and not look down on people, but embrace that and make people feel comfortable. Until this day, she still gets referrals of the kids of her former clients. And she's kind of semiretired. She's bought a lot of property. And she was always forward thinking.

My dad was the idealist. He ran a clinic in Bed-Stuy. He was the worst person with money. And in the film, like - which is true - my parents had - my dad had bought a building for his office, and when it was time to sell, he didn't believe in selling it for a profit, even though we were drowning in medical bills. He really believed that that was usury by Islamic law. So he was idealist to the nth degree, I mean, to the point of - you know, he was - did Medicaid for patients, but we still always would visit people in their homes if they needed him. He never charged for that stuff because he thought that was the right thing to do. So my mom was the practical businesswoman, and my dad was the ever idealist living in the clouds.

GROSS: You know, it's interesting, and I think this is true of a lot of relationships, that your mother was so understanding of the people who she worked with professionally, the immigrants who she found houses and stores for as a realtor. But she had trouble understanding you and communicating with you.

KESHAVARZ: Isn't that always the case (laughter)? It's hard when it's at home, right?

GROSS: Yeah.

KESHAVARZ: But honestly, like, within the confines of our culture, you know, I was - never questioned that I would go to college. I was always - you know, I got into Berkeley and Northwestern. I was never told that I couldn't go away to college. You know, all those things were always at my disposal. I was given that right. It was never questioned. I think the question of sexuality was certainly a difficult one for my family, but I think one with - over time that, you know, they've learned to deal with.

GROSS: The mother in the movie says - talking about her silence - 'cause she says she always wanted a daughter. But years later, after she had you, she'd be silent. And she says, my silence was my strength. It kept me in control of my story, a way of dealing with sadness and not being touched by it. Can you talk a little bit about the idea of silence as strength?

KESHAVARZ: Yeah. I mean, it's very counterintuitive to our culture, right? We are a culture that is all about sharing or going to therapy and doing all this, like - about verbalizing our traumas. And I think...

GROSS: To understand each other and to express ourselves.

KESHAVARZ: Exactly. And I think my mother's understanding of how to survive was to kind of bury that in some ways and to say that - to just put it in a - and I think put it in a different place and then start a new chapter, a new life. And I thought that was a really interesting I remember in college, I studied about the Holocaust and about what literature came out after and how people didn't deal with the trauma in many ways of the Holocaust or how that transitioned for many intellectuals. I think it's a different way of thinking about trauma and different way of dealing with it, certainly one foreign to us in the West. But I think it was one that allowed her to flourish because it allowed her to be the person she wanted to be.

And she always said to me, like, I didn't want to be a victim. I didn't want people to feel bad for me. I didn't want to feel bad for myself. So I was going to be the strongest version of myself. I had to survive. But, you know, going back to that - I mean, but then, you know, when she came to - when we shot the sections in Turkey - and she's so - my mom's so outgoing, and then she met the young girl from Iran who's 14, who plays her. She was so quiet. And I said, Mom, what's wrong? She said, I never realized how young I was...

GROSS: Oh.

KESHAVARZ: ...And how much I had gone through until this moment (crying). And it really moved me.

GROSS: Yeah. Because - I mean, it's amazing to me that she married so young, and I guess your mother was so strong, and it was the culture of the time. But now she could see it through different eyes.

KESHAVARZ: Yeah. I mean, I think my mother's lesson of strength is one I certainly take with me, you know, in every day of my life, you know, having grown up with bullies or having to still say, you know, I'm Iranian, even though we would get beat up or, you know, an uncomfortable situation saying, yeah, I'm queer. Is that a problem? Or being a filmmaker, being a female filmmaker in Hollywood, a woman - I mean, that's a near impossibility itself. That's a constant battle even to this day. I think all these ideas of strength and having to - it's a given as a woman that we have to push against the norms. This is something I have learned from my mother from day one. She would always say, it doesn't hurt to ask. You know, you have to defend yourself. You have to find a way. You can't accept no for an answer. These are things that I learned from my mother, and I think her strength has been an inspiration. I just never knew until writing this film the origins of that strength.

GROSS: Does your mother like your film?

KESHAVARZ: So I was terrified at Sundance. All my brothers came out. And, you know, we had the premiere and a standing ovation. And I was looking for - my brothers high five me. I can't find my mom. We go to the after party, my mom is still not around. And I'm talking to my agent, my lawyer, and my mom comes up to me and grabs my face. And I think she was going to slap me in front of everyone. And she said, you did our family justice. And I was - whew, that's the best review I've had. But, you know, honestly, I made the film with all of my family - you know, with my family's acknowledgement. My mother in the past always said, you know, this is a source of shame. We shouldn't talk about it. And then when I came back to her and I said I was writing this film, she said, you know, it's time that we tell our own stories. It's time, as women, that we speak and understand that our stories are important and that we need to tell them. And with that blessing, I started to actually write the film.

GROSS: Well, I think I have to interrupt again and take a short break, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROBBEN FORD AND BILL EVANS' "PIXIES")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Maryam Keshavarz. Her new film is called "The Persian Version." It's a fiction film inspired by Keshavarz's life and her mother's life. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Iran in 1967.

In the movie, your main character, Leila, gets pregnant. So she had been - in the movie, she had been recently divorced from her wife. And this was, like, the first man that she slept with.

KESHAVARZ: (Laughter).

GROSS: So - but you got pregnant, too, after your divorce from your wife. And I'm wondering - so this might be too personal, so let me preface my question with that. You decided to keep the baby. And can I ask you how you made that decision? Because I think that's a hard one for a lot of women, you know, whether to keep the baby or have an abortion. And if you're willing to share your thoughts about your decision, I'd love to hear it.

KESHAVARZ: Honestly, it's - I think of the film as another - it's a pro-choice film in many ways, because I think to have the option of choice doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have an abortion, but you have that option on the table. So that's how I like to frame and think about it. And that's certainly how I framed it when I was faced with this - with what happened. And I think I - when it actually happened to me, I just felt so connected, like, early on to what this child could mean for me. I don't know why. It has no rhyme or reason. It didn't fit into my life. It didn't fit into the person who, you know, got me pregnant, the father of the child, who is a lovely person.

It was, honestly, an instinctual thing. And I think I had always wanted to have a family, but things didn't work out in different ways. So I thought it didn't - certainly didn't fit into the traditional concept of family. And then I thought, what the hell, I'm not a traditional person. Let's just go with it. And sometimes we have to take the opportunities that are in front of us. That's certainly been the way I've operated in my life. And then when this came as an opportunity, I really thought about it really hard. And I thought, OK, I can do this. I want to do this. And it became a choice.

GROSS: Is the father still in your daughter's life or your life?

KESHAVARZ: Oh, yes. Strangely, we were together for over a decade (laughter).

GROSS: Oh, really?

KESHAVARZ: Yes. And it's a fictional version of him. He's, you know, nothing like that. But lovely human and a wonderful father. You know, we're separated now but continues to be a big part of, you know, both of our lives - a fellow artist and rule-breaker. And, you know, I think, through our relationship, we realized that there is no, you know, real definition of what it means to be a couple. It'd be funny because I was, you know, eight months pregnant, go to - whatever - a birthing class or something like, oh, how cute, how long have you guys been together? I'm like, well, I'm eight months pregnant, so like eight months and two weeks. No...

(LAUGHTER)

KESHAVARZ: No, I mean, in real life, we were together at least a month and a half before I got pregnant.

GROSS: (Laughter).

KESHAVARZ: But it was essentially the same idea.

GROSS: Right.

KESHAVARZ: And it would always shock people. And they're like, oh, you know, where do you guys live? I'm like, well, I live here. And he lives, you know, across the lake. You know, we didn't live together, we just maintained our lives. And we would joke, like, for 10 years that we were just dating, even though we had a kid, because, you know, we define what's normal. And I guess that was our normal.

GROSS: Your mother must have been so confused.

KESHAVARZ: Yes, just like in the movie (laughter).

GROSS: First she had to deal with you being a lesbian, and now she has to deal with you having a child with a man without being married...

KESHAVARZ: Oh, my God. It was just like that.

GROSS: And raising a child together but living separately.

KESHAVARZ: To my whole family just, like, it certainly was a - threw my family in a little bit of a tailspin. But, you know, I have to admit, I have some great brothers, who just took it all in stride and like, oh, that's so Maryam.

(LAUGHTER)

KESHAVARZ: What else do you have up your sleeve?

GROSS: So I just want to ask you briefly about the young actress who, at the age of 14, played the 13-year-old version of your mother during the period that your mother was entering an arranged marriage and quickly got pregnant. She's amazing in the film. She is from Iran. The film was shot, I think, in Turkey?

KESHAVARZ: Correct.

GROSS: But she still lives in Iran. Do you worry about there being consequences for her because of this film? - because that film, like your film which was banned, has a main character who is, in this case, bisexual.

KESHAVARZ: Yes. I mean, she's an amazing kid. She's now a freshman in high school. We auditioned all these different people, and she won because of her incredible nuance. We brought her to Sundance. We were able to get her a visa. And, you know, my biggest stress was her going back. And the whole process of even casting her and speaking with her is that we know that it's a dangerous endeavor - right? - to bring cast from other countries to work with me in particular because I'm so controversial. But, you know, she really connected with the material. She really wanted to do it. I spoke at length with her parents, and they felt that her section of the film would not put her in a compromising position. And they felt that it was important to tell the story of many women in Iran who have, you know, been put into this situation.

So - but I have to say, when she was returning from Sundance back to Iran was the most stressful 48 hours of my life because you feel such a responsibility to your actors when they go home. But, you know, she said, I fight the battle every day. I've been fighting before I met you. She doesn't wear - she would wear baseball caps and not wear hijab. And I will continue to fight. And she's a fighter. She said she wants to make change, and so she's not afraid. So I have to support her.

GROSS: And she's been OK - no consequences.

KESHAVARZ: So far, so good.

GROSS: I want to end our interview with the music that ends your film. And as our listeners may recall, you smuggled, you know, cassettes of music into Iran when you were a child and you were going back and forth between the two countries. And one of the cassettes you smuggled in was Cyndi Lauper, which is a favorite at parties. So in the movie, in the final scene, we hear the actress who plays your mother in the film singing "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." And it's a big dance scene where everybody's dancing. So what is the significance of this song to you?

KESHAVARZ: Well, "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" is - it was the first music video I had ever seen that had, like, queer representation. There's, like, queer gendered people in the music video. There's also people of all different ethnic backgrounds in the video. So it was very important to me, that song. And so we - our composer is Rostam Batmanglij from Vampire Weekend. So I - we talked about making a Persian version of that to end the film. Because so much of the film is looking at American '80s music and Iranian '80s music, we thought, how great to combine those.

So we had - the lead actress, who's a great singer, sang it. And then we used Persian instrumentation to that classical song of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." And that's how the film ends - as a perfect hybrid of America and Iran. And then we do it to a sort of Bollywood-esque sequence because Bollywood was also a big influence in Iran in the '80s during the war. They used to smuggle in Bollywood films. So it's kind of a hybrid of all the things that were floating in that era for me as a kid.

GROSS: That's great. Maryam Keshavarz, I'm so glad we talked. Thank you so much.

KESHAVARZ: Thank you.

GROSS: Maryam Keshavarz wrote and directed the new film "The Persian Version." We recorded our interview last week. Here's the version of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" that ends her film.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN")

LAYLA MOHAMMADI: (Singing) I come home in the morning light. My mother says, when you going to live your life right? Oh, mama, joon, we're not the fortunate ones. But girls - they wanted to have fun. Oh, girls just want to have fun. The phone rings in the middle of the night. My father yells, what you going to do with your life? Oh, papa, joon, you know you're still No. 1. But girls - they want to have fun. Oh, girls just want to have - that's all they really want - is some fun. When the working day is done, oh, girls - they want to have fun. Oh, girls just want to have fun. Girls - they want to, they want to have fun. Girls - they want to have fun.

GROSS: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @NPRFreshAir. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Therese Madden. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN")

MOHAMMADI: (Singing) That's all they really want - is some fun. (Singing in Persian). Oh, girls - they want to have fun. Oh, girls just want to have fun. Girls - they want to, want to have fun. Girls - they want to have fun. They just want to, they just want to, they just want to, they just want to, they just want to, they just want to...

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