Iran's cinemas have succumbed to hard-line pressure and stopped showing a hit film ridiculing the ruling clerics -- a move that could stifle pioneering film-making, film industry officials said Wednesday.
"The Lizard" follows the fortunes of a thief who escapes prison by donning the turban and robes of a mullah. Ironically, he proves a crowd-pleaser as a preacher.
After narrowly squeezing past the country's zealous censors the film played to packed cinemas, breaking box office records.
But its planned 11-week run was cut short Tuesday after four weeks amid a mounting campaign by religious hard-liners for it to be banned.
Film officials said the debacle could dissuade directors from tackling sensitive political topics in future.
"Movie makers may not pursue films that poke fun at the clerics, fearing they will meet the same fate," Farshid Motameni-Azar, a spokesman for the Iranian Cinema Society said.
A film critic, who declined to be named, said Iran's religious hard-liners were sending filmmakers a message "not to tackle religious films, especially ones that make fun of clerics, and make films about romance instead."
Several moderate clerics have praised the film, pointing to the protagonist's gradual moral transformation as he relinquishes his life of crime and finds God.
But hard-liners were incensed by many scenes such as when the thief-turned-cleric seductively eyes a young widow on a train and comically tries to improvise Arabic prayers when conducting a sermon in a mosque.
"(He) allows singing in the mosques and even encourages it ... He angrily encourages a boy who has memorized the holy Koran to find himself a girlfriend," noted the hardline Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper said in an editorial this month.
"The film ... which is an insult to all the good things that must be respected in religion ... is the work of a few criminals who are ready to sell the nation for money," the paper said.
Iran's filmmakers, often decorated at foreign film festivals, frequently fall afoul of the censors at home as they try to stretch the boundaries of what is permissible to screen.
"This film pushed back the boundaries because nobody has thought about making a comedy about clerics before," said cinema critic Amir Hossein Rasael.
Film producer Ali Reza Davoudnejad said the premature ending to screening of "The Lizard" was "not a good sign."
"If its screening had continued there would have been a feeling of more openness to make popular films," he said.
Another critic, who declined to be named, said the film's success was a show of "civil disobedience" by the public.
"It would be better for hardline clerics to ponder why people really welcomed the film rather than calling for a ban," he said.