Iran bans film festival over hijab

Iranian authorities have banned a film festival that put out a publicity poster featuring an actress who was not wearing a hijab headscarf, state media reported.

The ban comes after the Iranian Short Film Association (ISFA) released a poster for its upcoming Short Film Festival featuring Iranian actress Susan Taslimi in the 1982 film "The Death of Yazdguerd".

The website of Iran’s judiciary said court cases had been filed in connection with the photos, without elaborating.

The move appears to be part of a new campaign launched last week to impose the Islamic dress code nearly a year after the morality police largely melted away in the face of widespread protests.

Nationwide protests erupted last fall after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police. She appears to have been detained for violating the country’s dress code, which requires that both men and women dress conservatively and that women cover their hair in public.

The protests, in which women played a leading role, quickly escalated into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy, which took power after the 1979 revolution. Authorities responded with a heavy crackdown in which more than 500 protesters were killed and nearly 20,000 were detained. The protests largely faded at the start of this year but there are still widespread signs of discontent.

After the protests began, the morality police largely vanished from the streets and many women, particularly in Tehran and other cities, stopped wearing the hijab.

But officials insisted throughout the crisis that the rules had never changed. Iran’s ruling clerics view the hijab as a key pillar of the Islamic Republic and consider Western-style dress to be a sign of decadence.

Last week, the morality police returned to the streets as officials announced a new campaign to force women to wear the hijab.