These days, from thousands of miles away in the United States, as I follow the news and images of the devastation of my homeland, Iran, words have taken on a different taste for me. For years I have been a film critic; I have made films; I have written with passion and conviction about aesthetics, mise-en-scène, narrative, rhythm, light, and silence. Cinema was a home for me, a place where I sought refuge. But today, when I hear the news of children in my country being killed, when I read that a school has been targeted or that a house has collapsed on the people inside it, nothing rises in my heart anymore about framing or the subtleties of acting. In the face of the death of children, all theories of cinema lose their meaning.
And yet, perhaps the only thing that still allows me to breathe is returning to the very cinema I believed in for so many years—a cinema created not merely for entertainment, but for bearing witness. A cinema that has exposed the ugliness of war without disguise and has refused to let violence hide behind seductive words such as “freedom,” “liberation,” or “security.”
Whenever I think of Come and See, a shiver runs through me. The film tells the story of World War II through the eyes of a Belarusian teenager. That childlike face that gradually transforms into the face of a broken old man by the end of the film, for me, represents every child whose childhood is stolen by war. Today, when I think of the children of Iran, I see that same terrified gaze—a look that will never again laugh with the simplicity of yesterday.
Or Grave of the Fireflies, that heartbreaking Japanese masterpiece that follows two children amid the ruins of World War II. It is a film that shows war does not exist only on the battlefield; it lives in empty kitchens, in hungry stomachs, and in silent tears. Every time I watched that film, I told myself this must be the darkest place imaginable. But today I realize that darkness continues to repeat itself in our world.
In Grave of the Fireflies by Stanley Kubrick, war is not a scene of heroism but a portrait of the stupidity and cruelty of power structures. Soldiers sacrificed to the ambitions of commanders remind me of ordinary people who become victims of the decisions of politicians who have never smelled gunpowder themselves. For them, war is a map on a table; for the people, it is a nightmare in the streets and inside their homes.
In Apocalypse Now, the madness of war is laid so bare that the boundary between civilization and savagery collapses. For years I wrote about the metaphors of this film, about its journey into the heart of darkness. Today, I feel that darkness is no longer a metaphor. It is real, it is present, and it repeats itself in the headlines of every day.
And how could one not speak of The Thin Red Line? A film that shows how nature, with all its beauty, stands silent and bewildered before human madness. Trees and grasslands become witnesses to killing, unable to cry out. Just as many in the world today watch—and remain silent.
In the cinema of the Middle East as well, war has often revealed its naked face. Waltz with Bashir, by Ari Folman, explores memory and guilt, showing that even years after a war ends, its nightmares do not disappear. And Persepolis, based on the work of Marjane Satrapi, reveals through the memories of a teenage girl how politics and war can fracture private life.
I, who for years tried to build bridges between cultures, now sit in a country whose name appears in the news alongside the bombing of my homeland. This contradiction has robbed me of sleep. Sometimes I feel I have gone mad—suspended between two geographies, between a deep love for cinema and a deeper wound for my country. Can one love art and at the same time witness the destruction of one’s home? Can one write about the beauty of a film when real images are more horrifying than any film ever made?
And yet perhaps that is precisely the answer: anti-war cinema does not exist to escape reality, but to confront it. These films remind us that war has no glory; that behind every grand slogan lies a body; that behind every “victory” stands a mother dressed in black.
Today I understand more than ever why we must write about these films—not as detached critics, but as wounded human beings. If war turns people into numbers, cinema gives them faces again. If politics reduces death to statistics, art transforms it into tears.
I still love cinema, even if today I say that nothing seems to matter anymore. Perhaps it is this very love that allows me, in the midst of darkness, to still believe in images that shout the truth: the image of children who should not have died, the image of a mother who should not have been forced to mourn, the image of a homeland that should not have been drenched in blood.
