What it means
فیلمنامه (film-name) is a screenplay, the written script of a film. The construction is transparent: فیلم (film, the English loanword) plus نامه (name, a Persian word for letter, document, written text). The same نامه shows up in نمایشنامه (namayesh-name, theater script), زندگینامه (zendegi-name, biography), and شبنامه (shab-name, night letter, the historic samizdat pamphlet). The pattern is productive and old.
In Iran a film-name is treated as a literary form in its own right. Published screenplays sell in bookshops. Major directors release book editions of their scripts. Film-name workshops are taught at Khaneh-ye Cinema in Tehran and at every university with a cinema program.
How to use it
film-name-ye in film ra khod-e farhadi neveshte ast.
The screenplay of this film was written by Farhadi himself.
فیلمنامه این فیلم را خود فرهادی نوشته است.
film-name-ye “jodaie-ye nader az simin” oscar-e behtarin film-name-ye original ra bord.
The screenplay of “A Separation” won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
فیلمنامه “جدایی نادر از سیمین” اسکار بهترین فیلمنامه اوریجینال را برد.
The Iranian tradition
Iran has a world-class screenwriting culture. Asghar Farhadi won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for A Separation (2011), one of only a few non-English films to do so. Dariush Mehrjui’s adaptations (his 1969 The Cow, his 1990s Hamoun, Sara, Pari, Leila) are studied in screenwriting programs in Iran and abroad. Abbas Kiarostami’s deliberately spare scripts, where most of the film exists between the lines, are their own school. Bahram Beyzaie, both a director and one of the most respected screenwriters in modern Persian literature, has published volumes of his scripts that are read as books in their own right.
Where it comes from
The compound film-name dates from the 1930s, when Iranian cinema began producing original Persian-language features and needed vocabulary. The model was the European screenplay tradition (the French scénario, the German Drehbuch, the English screenplay), with the Persian compound providing a transparent native equivalent. Earlier theater script vocabulary (نمایشنامه, namayesh-name) supplied the template.
Where to study or buy one
Published Iranian screenplays sit on the shelves of Tehran’s major bookshops on Karim Khan, Enghelab Street, and Vali Asr. Niloofar Publications and Roshangaran are two presses that publish them regularly. The Farabi Cinema Foundation runs writing workshops; Khaneh-ye Cinema (Iran Cinema House) hosts public seminars.
In our voice
If you can read Persian, read a film-name before you watch the film it became. Iranian screenplays are dense and literary, and a Farhadi script is closer to a Chekhov play in print than to a Hollywood treatment.
References
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