Iran selects “Muhammad: Messenger of God” for foreign Oscar race

PanARMENIAN.Net - Iran has selected “Muhammad: The Messenger of God”, the controversial blockbuster about the birth and rise of Islam directed by Majid Majidi as its candidate for the foreign-language Academy Award, according to Variety.

Considered the most expensive Iranian movie ever made, the $40 million epic lensed by multiple Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro and with a score by Indian Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman, recently prompted a fatwa from a Muslim group in India – angered about its alleged depiction of God – and has also sparked other forms of disapproval from Sunni religious authorities.

Iranians belong to the predominantly to the minority Muslim Shiite sect.

The partly government-financed “Muhammad” is currently playing on more than half of Iran’s roughly 320 screens after opening the Montreal Film Festival on August 27.

Box office receipts have reportedly hit over 70 billion Iranian Rials, roughly $2 million in one month, according to the government-controlled Tehran Times. If that figure is accurate, it’s a nice haul.

The incendiary issue that Muslims are not allowed to depict God in images caused concern in Iran during the seven year gestation of the religious blockbuster, which depicts the future prophet from birth through the age of twelve.

Variety critic Alissa Simon in her review of “Muhammad” wrote that “Majidi respects Islamic convention by never showing Muhammad’s face and shooting him mostly from the back.”

Majidi has said that through the biopic he aimed to remove the “violent image” of Islam created by jihadist groups.

Majidi previously scored Iran’s first Oscar nomination when his “Children of Heaven” was nominated in the foreign-language category in 1998.

Iran won its first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” in 2012.