Conversations in Tehran

In early 2004, filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond (Salam Iran, a Persian Letter) and author Fred A. Reed (Persian Postcards: Iran after Khomeini) returned to Iran after a two-year absence―on the eve of the parliamentary elections that were to seal the political defeat of the Reform movement. They had come to interview several of the men and women who had propelled Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in 1997, with a mission to rebuild a civil society in Iran under the banner of human rights, democracy, free speech and a renewed dialogue of civilizations.

This is their report: Iran’s once lively press has been all but silenced, the country’s most outspoken journalists imprisoned, and, argues Mohsen Kadivar, one of the regime’s sharpest critics, the shah’s crown has now merely been replaced by the mollah’s turban.

Most surprising of all, however, was the populist bitterness expressed against the now beleaguered Reform movement. Too many promises had gone unfulfilled; too many commitments neglected.

President Khatami’s Reform movement had failed to improve the people’s livelihood. Worse, it would not, or could not, defend its strongest supporters against assaults by those determined to stop a democratic restructuring of the modern world’s first religious state. It was, said Saïd Hajjarian, the Reform strategist semi-paralyzed in an assassination attempt, “too late”: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his radical cohorts were already lurking in the shadows.

Born in France in 1944, Jean-Daniel Lafond taught philosophy from 1966 to 1971 and wrote film criticism for La Revue du Cinéma while carrying out research in the educational sciences, specializing in media pedagogy. He became a Canadian citizen in 1981 and has since devoted his time to cinema, writing, and radio.

After working with filmmakers Arthur Lamothe and Pierre Perrault, Lafond rose to international prominence as a leading documentarist. In 1985, he directed his first feature-length documentary Les traces du rêve (Dream Tracks) for the National Film Board. He has since written and directed more than a dozen films that embody his commitment to using creative filmmaking to document the political upheavals of our time, including Tropique Nord (Tropic North) (1994), La liberté en colère (1994), Haïti dans tous nos rêves (Haïti in All Our Dreams) (1995), L’Heure de Cuba (Last Call for Cuba) (1999), Le temps des barbares (The Barbarian Files) (1999), Salam Iran, une lettre persane (Salam Iran, a Persian Letter) (2002), Le faiseur de théâtre (2002) and Le cabinet du Docteur Ferron (The Cabinet of Dr. Ferron) (2003). His most recent work includes Le fugitif (American Fugitive), filmed in 2005 in Iran and the United States.

A seasoned observer of the world and of our times, Lafond has crafted films that tell touching, philosophical and thought-provoking stories that resonate with the call of the road and mirror the fates of men and nations. Parallel to his involvement in cinema, Lafond has developed an original body of work for radio (Radio France and CBC Radio-Canada) and published several books on the cinema in French. He co-founded the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival, serving as its president until 2005.

Lafond is married to Michaëlle Jean, the twenty-seventh Governor General of Canada, and is actively involved in the responsibilities of his office as Viceregal Consort of Canada.

Talonbooks published his Conversations in Tehran in 2006.

International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. Anatolia Junction, his acclaimed work on the unacknowledged wars of the Ottoman succession, has been translated in Turkey, where it enjoys a wide following. Shattered Images, which explores the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Islam, has also been translated into Turkish, and into French as Images brisées (VLB éditeur, Montréal).

After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir.

A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli, Empire of Desire, Reed has translated works by many of Quebec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers.

Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive. The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). Fred A. Reed passed away on February 14th, 2024 in Agar, Morocco.