The famous director Lars Von Trier describes the relationship between his films and the audience as in the title: “You don't watch my movies by leaning back in your seats, but by feeling uncomfortable as if you have a pebble in your shoe”.
In his works, the director includes a confrontational examination of political, social and existential issues.
The director, who has won more than 100 awards at festivals around the world, has had the chance to exist with Europe's policies that do not lock the door of the individual to the intellectual world and do not censor the ability to produce with ‘intellectual discomfort’.
When we look back at our own history, our own story, we see how severely writers, directors, filmmakers, poets, poets and artists have been punished by the political powers against what they produce with “Intellectual Discomfort”.
The story of the pain inflicted on people who raise their voices against the suffering in social life, the destruction in the individual's world, injustice, injustice and marginalization, and who express their voices with “intellectual decency”, is the kind that can be the subject of works of art in which they express injustice and drama.
Sabahattin Ali's Daughter, Filiz Ali's “grief that her father does not even have a grave, needs a big heart and a pen as fluent in her mother tongue as Sabahattin Ali's.
on july 2, 1993
Sivas Madımak Hotel Massacre
when all hell breaks loose,
Three great poets,
Metin Altıok
Behçet Aysan
Ugur Kaynar
While waiting on the steps of the hotel in the darkness outside spewing unconscious hatred, Uğur Kaynar asks the following question;
“What do we do if things get bigger and something happens to one of us?”
Metin Altıok gives the answer that still burns us all these years
”those who stay write poetry for those who die”...
We wish it was not a situation where those who remain lament the dead, write poems, books and make movies in their memory!
It didn't happen, they didn't make it happen... Political powers have been so disturbed by the “discomfort of intellectuals” with what they see, feel and produce that they have gone after them with such fury that they have murdered intellectuals such as Uğur Mumcu, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı, Bahriye Üçok, Abdi İpekçi, Necip Hablemitoğlu and Sabahattin Ali, With the departure of poets like Nazım Hikmet and Ahmet Arif, who spent their lives in exile and prison, poets, writers and artists who were burned to death in the Madımak Massacre, director Yılmaz Güney, who died in exile, and musicians like Ahmet Kaya, who succumbed to his heart with homesickness, the doors of an enlightened intellectual world have unfortunately closed on us...
Today, we have been forced to be exposed to the authors of an intellectual misery who do not even have a sufficient command of our mother tongue, whose pen is for rent, whose livelihood is provided by the ideology they lean on, who call themselves intellectuals!
Today, while imperialism and Zionism are trying to occupy the Iranian Geography, the Ancient Country, Iran, with its music, poetry and cinema, is challenging a shallow intellectual world, the expensive, hollow, empty world of Hollywood, far from real human stories!
The authoritarian and repressive approach of the political power in Iran has of course created difficult times for intellectuals and artists, but intellectuals and artists, nourished by their national culture and the roots of ancient Iran, have managed to tell the world that ’Iran and we as Iranians‘ exist.
The only thing that will protect us from both the global gang's immoral wars and imperialism's invasion of our culture is to feed on Anatolia's thousands of years of history and our roots,
Not to be afraid of the intellectual discomfort and opposition of our intellectuals from the different colors, thoughts and intellectual discomfort of the “Garden of a Thousand Flowers ANATOLIA” as Yaşar Kemal described it!
I would like to end my article by commemorating the great poet of Iran in solidarity with the struggle of the Iranian people against the global gang,
Sadi-Sadi Shirazi speaks to the world from ages ago with his answer to the question of what a human being is:
“Yek katre - i hûnest, sâd hezârân endişe.
”A drop of blood and a thousand worries."
Pebbles in our shoes...