Actress banned from Iran says nude shoot was 'symbolic gesture'

London, Jan 20 (ANI): The actress who has been banned from Iran for posing nude in a French magazine, said that she did so as a "symbolic gesture" to help remove taboos.

Golshifteh Farahani said the government has sent a communication telling her not to travel back to her homeland.

Iran' local news agency had attacked her for slipping from the modest respectability of Iranian cinema to the vulgarity of Western culture.

It said that a result of her decision to seek fame outside Iran was that she fell into the corruption and decadence associated with the Hollywood film industry.

"The actress who once played the role of caring and decent mothers of Iran has now auctioned her modesty and honour in front of the Western cameras," the Telegraph quoted the agency as saying.

A photograph of Farahani standing naked in a studio was published in the latest edition of Madame Le Figaro magazine. The publication has attracted a wave of visitors to her Facebook page from Iran and the Middle East.

A message posted on a Facebook site linked to the actress later carried a statement in which she explained her decision to take part in the Figaro shoot.

"This video clip is a symbolic gesture to remove the common taboos that exist in various societies and does not aim to promote nudity or sex," it said.

"By taking part in these photo shoots the people taking part wish to demonstrate their redemption from these taboos by the way they act and talk.

"The objective is to liberate their soul and bodies at the same time. As long as an individual has no power over her or his body and their soul does not have the command of the way they wish to think, then they do not have a true freedom.

"Although I do not think looking at the nude photo of another human may have an attraction, but it is certainly far more enjoyable than looking at the fully covered and burqa and hejab wearing body of a woman who has been wrapped and imprisoned by her man. So much for not looking at women as sex symbols as the fundamentalists want us to believe!" it said.

The Paris-based actress left Iran last year to protest against restrictive Islamic codes that the Iranian cinema industry has to follow under Ahmadinejad's conservative cultural policies.

The agency revealed Iranian officials had been shocked by her decision.

"It was first assumed that this might be yet another plot by the enemy but the disaster dawned when she herself published her nude photo on her Facebook page.

"By doing so she has now diminished whatever popularity of her that had remained in Iran. It seems that her action is a short film and in line with the Western plots to challenge the Islamic Awakening movement that is sweeping the region," it said.

A second website, Sarat, which has links to radical elements of the clergy, published a poster showing Farahani burning in the fires of hell - where it said she would reside for eternity.

"Those who turned infidels have been misled by the despots who have managed to turn them away from the light and lead them to darkness. They belong to the fires of the hell and shall always stay in there," the text said. (ANI)

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