Iran director says west cinema in dead end

Mohammad Reza Eslamlou, director and culture expert, says the west cinema has reached a dead end, but they don’t publicly admit the fact.

Eslamlou, who has directed films such as ‘A Meteor Like Light’, pinpointed his long years of residence in the US and then France, as indicators of his firsthand experience of the west and its educational system.

Here’s the rest of what he told reporters.

Eslamlou says Oliver Stone, the renowned American filmmaker, who recently travelled to Iran to attend the 36th Fajr Film Festival, would in his meetings with me, repeatedly emphasize that the west cinema is in a dead end; the Iranian director added that Stone is one of those westerners, who also noted that nowadays a large number of American filmmakers are in pursuit of the east, and the eastern culture, but are not brave enough to get inspired by our culture, and produce movies based on such inspiration.

He stressed that what Stone says is a source of pride for us, as the western directors have arrived at the conclusion that the west’s path would lead to absurdity.

The Iranian director, who has also made the movie ‘The Seyyed’s Garden’, explained that the above point is what we need to teach the young generation who is studying cinema, while it’s unfortunately trendy for them to even produce the subtitles of their movies in English, so they would be praised by the westerners, after being watched. According to him, the Muslim youth need to raise the awareness that their own culture is the richest, and they should not pursue that of the west.

He called for further promotion of the cinema that puts the history of the Islamic revolution in spotlight, and favors the local, national and Islamic culture of Iran, so that the end products would be films that continue to be the flag-bearers of cultural resistance vis-à-vis the westerners.

MF/MF