Iranian Cinema

Accountable to the Future

Gareth Higgins on IRANIAN CINEMA, ACCOUNTABLE TO THE FUTURE

This is a post about Iranian cinema, and the importance of paying attention to the stories told by Iranian filmmakers. But it needs to begin with the words of a Brazilian educator, spoken on a podcast with a New York futurist, interpreted here by an Irish writer, which in itself is a re-clarifying that inter-being is far more real than the story of the separate self, without which story nobody would want to bomb each other.

I heard Vanessa Machado de Oliveira tell Douglas Rushkoff recently that she used to advocate accountability for the pain of the world. That we must allow ourselves to sense the overwhelm, terror, and grief faced by so many as a fact of every day life, and avoided by so many as an existential threat to almost all of life - otherwise the guilt for avoidance would be just as overwhelming. But she realized that she was “drowning in the sadness and the anger, right, rage and frustration of it. For a long time, I really thought that the accountability was to the pain…To be able to sense the pain and metabolize this pain, we need to do it collectively. [The] collective pain of the land, of other beings, other species and other human beings that are suffering right now, the collective nature of it [is] overwhelming for an individual heart. And we have lost the rituals to do it together.