‘What can I do to offer a little bit of a dream to people?’: Marjane Satrapi dies of ‘sadness’ at 56

In January 2016, Marjane Satrapi was in New Delhi after days of location and talent scouting for the cinematic adaptation of French writer Romain Puértolas’s The Extraordinary Journey of The Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Cupboard that she was to direct. She had got on board actor Dhanush for the lead, talks were on with Uma Thurman, and the 46-year-old was looking forward to the start of the shooting schedule in Jodhpur later in the summer.

It had been well over a decade since the publication of Persepolis, her graphic novel in two parts, about an Iranian girl coming of age during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War but its towering success notwithstanding, the French-Iranian graphic novelist-and-filmmaker declared that she had no interest to the art form any more.

“I am like a car that cannot drive back. Once something is finished, it’s finished. You know all these people who get divorced and then get married to the same guy? If you want to get remarried, at least try someone new. I don’t like to go back to doing the same thing, so I don’t think I will make comic books (she preferred the term to ‘graphic novels’) anymore. It was very pleasant, I was very happy doing it, now I want to make movies. Cinema is a medium for creating compassion,” she told The Indian Express during an interaction at a hotel in Chanakyapuri.

Satrapi eventually left the project that ended up being directed by Canadian filmmaker Ken Scott but her advocacy of compassion and freedom and her penchant for speaking her mind remained with her till the end.

On Thursday, the office of French President Emmanuel Macron announced her death. Satrapi was 56.

(The news agency Reuters adds: A statement released by members of her family ⁠to the French news agency AFP said she had died of “sadness” a little over a year after the death of her husband, Swedish actor, producer and screenwriter Mattias Ripa.)

Satrapi moved to France in 1994 and became a citizen in 2006. Persepolis, which served both as memoir and history, recounts the story of her early life in Tehran, struggling under the growing authoritarianism of Iran’s theocratic government after the 1979 Revolution, up until she begins a life as an exile in Europe. The two volumes of the book, published in English in 2003 and 2004 respectively, were followed by Embroideries (2003), another graphic novel that explores women’s lives and feminism in Iran, as well as Chicken with Plums (2006). Her career as a filmmaker included Persepolis (2007), Chicken with Plums (2011), The Voices (2014), Radioactive (2019) and Dear Paris (2024).

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Born into an upper-middle class politically active family, she grew up in Tehran. Her parents encouraged her to be independent and free-thinking. But the Iranian revolution of 1979 upended their world. The increasing crackdown on civil liberties by the theocratic state, the repression of political activists, the steady erosion of women’s rights, her growing anger and immersion in political protests eventually made her parents send her to Austria, and later, to France.

Satrapi forever carried in her heart the memories of those decades, remaining a life-long critic of Iran’s Islamic leadership. In 2022, following the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in custody of Iran’s morality policy for allegedly breaching the dress code, as huge protests broke out across Iran, demanding jin, jiyan, azadi (women, life, freedom), Satrapi stood in solidarity with them. She participated in protests in Paris, curated and edited an anthology of graphic nonfiction, Woman, Life, Freedom, and amplified their sorrows and demands among the diaspora.

And yet, she held that active politics had never interested her. In the 2016 interview, she had said, “To be in politics, you have to love power, and I really hate power… A long time ago, I was very much into politics because I believed that with politics you can change the world. In reality, it was not me who was changing the world. Getting close to politics was changing me. I became extremely cynical and then you are like, okay, so what can I do to offer a little bit of a dream to people?”

France offered her that creative and emotional succour. It was in Paris that she met her husband, Mattias Ripa, with whom she worked on many award-winning projects, and whose death in April 2025 left her heartbroken.

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But even in a country that felt like home, she wore her scepticism like second skin. Last year, Satrapi refused to accept the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit, citing the country’s hypocritical attitude toward Iran.

In the 2016 interview, looking back at the woman she had been in Iran to the person she was then, Satrapi had said, “I was an angry person. Even if it doesn’t look like it, I am calmer now. There are certain things that don’t change though. I really never believe in what people tell me, like the idea of the majority. I remember even when I was a child and I was told, ‘The majority of people think…’ I was like, if the majority was right, we should live in f*** paradise and we don’t live in f*** paradise, which means the majority of the people are wrong. I never believe what they tell me and that is what will probably never change.”