Can Iran Tolerate Its Own History?

A new documentary project that gives a say to people close to the shah and his toppled monarchy is testing the limits of today’s Iranian regime
Life under the Shah of Iran: Filmmaker Hossein Dehbashi has compiled an oral history from dozens of interviews with prominent members of pre-revolutionary Iranian society. Photo: Bill Spindle/The Wall Street Journal
Bill Spindle
Hossein Dehbashi, a 43-year-old Iranian documentary filmmaker, is making a splash in Tehran by giving voice to some of the most controversial figures in Iran: high officials and leading lights of the regime of the shah, overthrown in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution.
Long disparaged as traitors and dupes, the officials should be seen more objectively, says Mr. Dehbashi, who earlier this year published the first four volumes of an ambitious new oral history that gives a say to members of Iran’s ancien regime.
“They’ve got their stories to tell,” says Mr. Dehbashi.
Those are fighting words in Iran. As the first generation of the country’s revolutionary leaders age, they are struggling, even among themselves, to define the identity and future of the country and its theocratic regime—and they are not eager to cast a more understanding light on the monarchy they toppled.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who personified the revolution, died in 1989. Now his heirs, the coterie of radicals with whom he surrounded himself, are in their 70s and 80s. Some are still very powerful, such as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some, such as former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have seen their influence wane. Still others are seriously on the outs—such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister and reformist presidential candidate, who has been under house arrest since 2011.
But even as Tehran’s aging revolutionaries argue, they can agree on one thing: Officials from the shah’s regime deserve a special place among the enemies of the Islamic Republic.
Mr. Dehbashi knows that interviewing sympathizers with the shah may be more than Iran’s government can stomach. In his elegant apartment in an upscale residential district of Tehran, he laughs and says, “You may be speaking to a future prisoner.”
Mr. Dehbashi says that he was surprised in his interviews to hear some of the shah’s old aides credit the Iranian Revolution for some positive changes. But many of them also made clear their distaste for the clerical regime.
“The mistake the [revolutionary] government made was to immediately undermine Iranian history,” says Ardeshir Zahedi, a former foreign minister and member of the royal family, in one of the interviews.
Mr. Dehbashi is part of a new generation shaping Iran’s outlook and identity. He says that he neither admires the toppled Pahlavi monarchy—as many of its former supporters still do—nor despises it. He supported the 2009 Green Movement for reform in Iran, but he doesn’t reject the Iranian Revolution or forthrightly disparage it.

Mr. Dehbashi plans 15 volumes and dozens of hours of documentary footage for his Iranian Oral History Project. His endeavor has gained support from some seemingly unlikely places: One of Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandsons recently agreed to have his picture publicly taken accepting the first four volumes as a gift from Mr. Dehbashi, and the state-run Iranian national archive has supported the project by providing some financing and office space.
Mr. Dehbashi grew up in Tehran, where the Islamic Revolution practically erupted on his doorstep. One day when he was 7, he remembers, his father—an office worker—brought home an assault rifle for protection as protests against the shah’s despised security forces raged in the streets. Another time, he recalls, one of his parents’ revolutionary acquaintances burst into his family’s home hoping to find someone who could drive a tank that the shah’s military had abandoned to a crowd.
“It seemed like a game to me at the time,” he says.
By the time he turned 12, Iran was enmeshed in what would become a bloody, grinding war with neighboring Iraq. Mr. Dehbashi worked with a paramedic squad, treating civilian victims of Iraqi bombings in Tehran.
As with many young Iranians, those two experiences—the chaos of revolution and the sacrifice of war—instilled in Mr. Dehbashi an unquestioning belief in the rightness of the Islamic Republic’s cause and the glory of martyrdom in its name. He believed wholeheartedly—until 2000, when he took a trip to Paris to make a television documentary about the revolution for one of Iran’s national broadcast stations.
He visited Abolhassan Banisadr, the Islamic Republic’s first president. Mr. Banisadr served 16 months before a run-in with Ayatollah Khomeini sent him into exile in 1981 to France. He has lived there ever since, and Tehran sees him as an enemy.
For the first time, says Mr. Dehbashi, he saw the revolution as a journalist-historian. Mr. Banisadr, he concluded, had a perspective that should be considered—and if he did, then so did others from that era. The talk with Mr. Banisadr “made me question everything,” says Mr. Dehbashi.
He moved to the U.S. and began contacting other former Pahlavi officials. Many were wary, particularly given his background working for the state-controlled broadcaster. “At first, they were suspicious,” he says. “Some wouldn’t participate.”
Slowly, though, he won some subjects over and set out to find them in places such as Gaithersburg, Md.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He traveled to London, Geneva, Brussels, Nice and Montreux, and he dug through diplomatic archives in the U.K. and files in Paris’s Sorbonne.
In all, he managed to interview 42 people for hundreds of hours: statesmen, diplomats, scholars, artists, ministers and newspaper editors.
Back in Iran, the project became a target for vocal and suspicious hard-liners. Once, Mr. Dehbashi says, the security guards at the national archive wouldn’t let him into his own office, complaining that his project was unpatriotic. A newspaper columnist accused him of accepting more than $2 billion in U.S. funding for the project—a charge that Mr. Dehbashi found particularly amusing given his shoestring budget at the time.
Mr. Dehbashi funded the bulk of the project with tens of thousands of dollars of his own funds and family money, he says. But he also received support from Iran’s national archive, where he still has an office with pictures of his documentary subjects on the wall.
He ran into a major snag in 2010 when he was arrested by U.S. immigration officials and accused of forging some documents as part of an application for U.S. residency. Mr. Dehbashi denies doing anything improper. He was released after two months, and he returned to Iran four days later. The U.S. attorney’s office declined to discuss the case.
Back in Iran, Mr. Dehbashi’s filmmaking talents came to the attention of Hasan Rouhani, a prominent cleric then pondering a long-shot run for Iran’s presidency. Mr. Dehbashi produced a video for Mr. Rouhani’s campaign that drew inspiration from President Barack Obama’s famous “Yes we can” message. Mr. Dehbashi’s version featured women singing and people playing musical instruments—both generally forbidden in public in Iran.
Then he went back to his oral-history project. The first four volumes immediately caused a stir. The conservative newspaper Jomhouri Eslami (whose name means “Islamic Republic”) opined that his work was “not based on real history…and is narrated by corrupted top officials of the Pahlavi regime who committed treason and now are trying to perjure themselves.” Others have rallied to support Mr. Dehbashi, including Hesam al-Din Ashna, an adviser to President Rouhani.
Mr. Dehbashi is wary of politics but not indifferent. “I’m just continuing with my work as a journalist and artist,” he says. “But every journalist and artist is political in a certain way.”