Bahram Beyzaie and the Second World War: A Narrative of Occupation and the Metamorphosis of the Concept of the Nation

Abstract

In his historical works, Bahram Beyzaie uses innovative methods of presentation and narration to highlight the events and narratives that were marginalized by dominant cultural and political discourses. One of the historical eras that Beyzaie has depicted in his works is the one in which Iran was occupied by the Allied powers during World War II. The present article studies Beyzaie’s film script Occupation (1980) to demonstrate how he turns the loss of a person into a symbol for the distortion of a nation’s cultural identity and connects the past to the present to highlight some of the cultural and social failures that leave Iranians at the mercy of internal and external opportunists.