For Iranian viewers sitting down for this year’s prime-time historical drama during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, there was a shock: you could see women’s hair.
The director’s trick: popping across the border to neighbouring Armenia to film women without headscarves in front of a “green screen” and then super-imposing them into the background of Iranian scenes.
“This is a technical achievement for our cinema and television that can be of service in future,” director Jalil Saman said in Wednesday’s Haft-e Sobh newspaper.
The month of Ramadan, which started on Saturday, is always a showcase for high-profile TV serials and this year it is Saman’s “Nafas” (or “Breath”), about a nurse being dragged into the revolutionary tumult of the late 1970s, that has garnered the most attention.
Iranian TV can show foreign films with unscarved women -- although too much leg or cleavage gets blurred out or hidden behind a digitally inserted object such as a lamp.
But local programmes must normally abide by strict rules in which no female hair can be shown, even for historical dramas or scenes set in a family home where real-life women do not cover their heads.
Saman said it would have been absurd to show everyone in a headscarf since the show is set before the Islamic revolution of 1979 when women were free to wear whatever they wanted.
{{/usCountry}}Saman said it would have been absurd to show everyone in a headscarf since the show is set before the Islamic revolution of 1979 when women were free to wear whatever they wanted.
{{/usCountry}}Shows set during that period are usually “ruined”, he told Haft-e Sobh, because they cannot show how things really looked.
“They give the impression that Islam was followed more before the revolution than today,” he said.
“We have only shown a part of how it was before the revolution but some cannot even tolerate this.”
Saman said he was refused permission by the censors to use actresses in wigs, a trick used for several high-profile shows in the past.
The other popular option -- having women in hats with scarves wrapped around their ears and neck -- was “ridiculous” he added.
So instead Saman turned to “green screening”, in which actresses are filmed in front of a green background that can be digitally removed and the character inserted into other scenes.
Iranian film-makers must obtain three separate authorisations: for the script, filming and release.
But the authorities admit that a majority of Iranians now own a satellite dish -- even though they are technically illegal -- beaming in uncensored programming from all over the world.
It is part of the steady erosion of strict Islamic rules -- in practice, if not in theory -- that has also seen headscarves pushed further and further back, especially in wealthier parts of Tehran.
President Hassan Rouhani won a resounding re-election victory this month, promising a further easing of social restrictions, although he faces considerable opposition from the clerical establishment.