Burning Our Cultural Bridges

Sometimes we’re just dumb.

Consider, for instance, the subject of visas. One of our goals in the war against terrorism is to “win the hearts and minds” of the “Arab street” and Muslims around the world. In other words, try to make them hate us a little less and perhaps even engender something akin to mutual respect. Then, hopefully, less of their young people will grow up wanting to achieve martyrdom by killing Americans.

So how do we go about this process of trying to ingratiate ourselves to young Muslims? Why, by insulting their cultural heroes, of course.

Take the shabby way our government treated Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, widely viewed as one of the greatest living filmmakers. Kiarostami was unable to attend the premier of his new movie, Ten, at the New York Film Festival, which began in late Sept., because he couldn’t get a visa to enter the U.S. in time.

His story is far from unique. Scores of artists and pop performers have fallen into this quagmire.

The difficulty grows out of the U.S. Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act, signed into law by the president May 14. Under the act (and related regulations created by the Bush administration), citizens of nations designated as “state sponsors of terrorism” -- currently Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Cuba -- are required to go through lengthy FBI and CIA background checks before receiving visas to enter the country. Citizens from 26 other undisclosed (but thought to be mostly Islamic) countries are subjected to a shorter mandatory waiting period.

Add to this the intensified scrutiny all visa applications are receiving in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and you have an obvious recipe for delay. The end result is that visas that once were issued in a few weeks can now take up to six months.

The idea, of course, is to prevent terrorists from entering the country, plainly a laudable goal. But the 62-year-old Kiarostami would seem an unlikely terrorist threat: An award-winning writer and director of 30 films, he has visited the U.S. seven times in the last 10 years. His 1997 film, Taste of Cherry, was the Palme D'Or winner at Cannes, and his latest film explores the lives of Iranian women living under an oppressive system. There was no indication he ever tried to blow up anything -- except, perhaps, a few cultural stereotypes.

And the snub wasn’t an oversight. Ines Aslan, a spokeswoman for the New York Film Festival, said festival organizers and others tried “very, very hard” to prevail on officials at the U.S. Embassy in Paris to make an exception for Kiarostami. Similar exceptions have been allowed in the past. But they hit a brick wall.

“It wasn’t that they could not make an exception,” she said. “It was that they did not choose to. It is very sad.”

Not surprisingly, this news wasn’t received well abroad. Jack Lang, a former French minister of education and culture, called it “intellectual isolationism and ... contempt for other cultures.” Aki Kaurismaki, a film director from Finland, boycotted the New York festival in protest. “If international cultural exchange is prevented,” he mused, “what is left? The exchange of arms?”

Other cultural figures who have been caught in the U.S. visa squeeze include Iranian pop diva Googoosh, who was forced to cancel a long scheduled concert, and 22 Cuban musicians prevented from attending the Latin Grammys; one of them, jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, won the Grammy for pop instrumental album.

One suspects that George W. Bush is no great lover of foreign language films, Persian pop music and Latin jazz. It probably doesn’t break his heart that cultural exchange, involving these and other art forms, has been hindered by the war on terrorism. But before he writes the whole thing off as soft-headed intellectual nonsense, he might want to talk to Norman Pattiz.