A whole civilisation will die tonight.
Trump’s threat to Iran.

Recently, the President of the United States posted tha “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

He meant it as a threat buut I keep reading it as an accidental elegy for something I love.

There is an iranian film called Taste of Cherry.

It was made in 1997 by Abbas Kiarostami, and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and for years I avoided it because someone told me it was about a man driving around Tehran trying to find someone willing to help him commit suicide. 

A man drives around the outskirts of Tehran asking strangers if they will bury him. That is the whole plot. And it is, somehow, the most radical argument for being alive I have ever encountered. a film about death was so impossibly, stubbornly full of life.



Here is what else Iranian cinema has given the world:

Jafar Panahi, banned from filmmaking by his own government, responded by hiding a camera in his taxi and making Taxi anyway, a film that won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2015. He accepted the award via an empty chair.

Asghar Farhadi gave us A Separation is about a marriage dissolving in Tehran, and it is also about class and faith and the impossible knot of moral obligation, and watching it I understood human beings slightly better than I had before. That is what great art is supposed to do.

Making art under repression is a hard thought, and a harder task. These filmmakers had to say enormous things in small containers. Whole worlds hidden inside a glance or an audition room or a car going nowhere. 



Kiarostami said a film should be like a rug with gaps in the weave, so the viewer can press their imagination through the holes. That is a philosophy of cinema. It is also, I think, a philosophy of survival.

Civilisations are not their governments. The people of Iran are not the Islamic Republic any more than the people of America are any particular president.

A civilisation is the things people make when they’re trying to understand what it is to be alive. It is the films you hide cameras inside taxis to make. It is the art that outlasts the power that tried to stop it.

Kiarostami died in 2016 but his films did not. A whole civilisation will live on tonight.