This most justified reproach for the peoples of the Middle East came from Shirazi's pen, but it was the lyrics of the song that Abbas Kiyarustemi, who introduced Iranian cinema to the world, listened to for the last time in a hospital room...
It is said that when Kiyarustemi was 15 or 16 years old, he admired Shirazi's poetry, but he could not afford to buy the poet's poetry books, so he borrowed a book of Shirazi's poetry that belonged to a friend's older brother for three days.
Before his friend's brother realizes, they have to put the book back where they took it. He spends three days writing the entire book by hand on paper, memorizing the poems in the process.
The poems he memorized in his teenage years never left him throughout his life, and the director Abbas Kiyarustemi, the witness of Iran's suffering, who listened to the poet's poetry on his deathbed in a hospital room in a song form that transformed the poet's poetry into the sensation of hearing the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in the universe, said goodbye to life by hearing these verses.
“Taste of Cherry”, which won Abbas Kiyarustemi the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, makes the viewer question and feel the “Value of Life” so deeply that you finish the movie with the realization that despite the cold reality of death, the human bond with life is the strongest bond on earth.
Cinema does not only transfer the pain and events witnessed to the screen, it makes people witness a country, a society, a house in that society, and what is experienced in that house...
You're right there, “on the scene”
To see Iran through the eyes of Abbas Kiyarustemi, and not from the point of view of imperialist, Americanist policies, is to see and recognize the real Iran.
Kiyarustemi was one of the few directors who chose to stay in Iran, unlike many producers and directors who left the country for western countries after the Iranian Revolution.
He doesn't go and says;
“If you remove a tree from where it has taken root and move it to another place, it will not bear fruit. Even if it does, it will not be as beautiful as it would have been in its original place. This is the law of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would have been just like that tree.”
Zeki Demirkubuz says of Kiyarustemi, “He is the prophet of cinema” and adds, ”he is the narrator of what a person lacks, not what he has“
These are the two words that describe and summarize the relationship between human, cinema, art and power, ‘what are you deprived of?
What the Iranian government deprived the Iranian people of was transferred to the cinema through Kiyarustemi's eyes and camera. However, this transfer was not with the American film industry's approach that humiliates, ignores, totally denigrates, vilifies, and makes nothing, but with the heart and mind of an Iranian.
Behind the camera was the heart and mind of a person who knows the ancient history of Iran, who smells the roses of Shiraz, who loves the Iranian people and its past.
One of the biggest partners in the operations in the Middle East was, of course, the American movie industry.
Their production, which started with spreading their footage of gross human rights violations to the world as a justification for the occupation, was only a trailer for the countries they would occupy and turn into an even bigger hell...
Iraq, Libya, Syria...
Have you ever seen a movie made about what the US did in Abu Ghraib prison during the invasion of Iraq, the human rights violations, the torture, or a TV series, no, you won't, because the American movie industry sells a flawless advertisement of an America that carries freedom wherever it goes.
In all of these productions that you watch with a bucket of corn, the only thing real and valuable is that bucket of corn!
Iraq, Syria, now for some time Iran...
We hope that Iran, where we hear the mullahs, the economic embargo, poverty and the howling of the organized anger of the poor, will find its own solutions, far from imperialism.
Cinema and art are, of course, also a great propaganda tool as they announce pain, evil and what is experienced. It is the greatest witness of what the governments deprive the people of, what they do not do and sometimes what they do; but when it meets the hearts of those who keep their national identity behind the camera, not those who present imperialism as a recipe for salvation, as in the case of Kiyarustemi, then cinema is art in itself...