Barbie in Latin America, Bollywood Holocaust and censorship in Iran

Influenced by the movie “Barbie”, Latin America took Barbie mania to the extreme. In Peru, anti-government demonstrators dressed women in pink and placed them in giant doll boxes in Lima’s main square to protest current president Dina Boluarte. Mexican traders are selling a Barbie doll modelled on presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum. Barbie is also presented as a Mexican mother looking for the remains of her children (there are about 111,000 missing people in Mexico).

After the Iranian Short Film Association (ISFA) published a poster announcing a film festival starring Iranian actress Susan Taslimi, who played in the 1982 film “The Death of Yazdgerd”, Iranian authorities banned the event because the actress is not wearing a hijab on the poster. In addition, the judiciary has taken legal action against the e-commerce company Digikala over photos of female employees without headgear.

The makers of the Bollywood film “Bawaal” faced criticism from viewers, film experts and Jewish organisations for trivialising and downplaying the deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. The filmmakers used Auschwitz-Birkenau as a metaphor for problems in interpersonal relations. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on Amazon com, Inc to remove the film from the Prime Video streaming platform and stop “monetising” the Holocaust. The Holocaust is barely taught in Indian schools – it is not mentioned by name in books, and in the past, some Indian textbooks glorified Adolf Hitler.