WCF 2021 – National Day of Türkiye – Game and Wildlife in Türkiye – Fehmi Arikan, DVM, PhD
World Conservation Forum
National Day of Türkiye
Inheritance . Trailer
While planning a trip to Florida in 2011 to see my ailing mother-in-law, I realized that the Department of Motor Vehicles had misspelled my last name.
I needed to have this mistake corrected immediately. While I searched for my father’s name, I came across several books describing his role in the history of modern Iran. Suddenly, all that had seemed certain to me — what I had been told about him — was turned upside down. This revelation, besides being shocking, opened up a wealth of information about his role vis-a-vis Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi king of Iran who ruled from 1925 until 1941. In that year, after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The latter is the king most people know of when the Shah of Iran is mentioned.
Until then, what I knew about my father was that he had been a general and a Minister of Finance under Reza Shah, that the Iranian paper currency had his signature on it, and that he had visited the US in 1944 where I was born. What I learned subsequently from those books on Iran of the Pahlavi era, however, painted a surprisingly troubling picture of his role.
I have been a filmmaker for most of my adult life. It occurred to me then that making a documentary film about the history of modern Iran by way of a personal memoir would literally be a documentary I was born to make.