Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of more than two million Iranians forced by politics to live abroad. The sooner he can return to making the films he wants to, preferably in and around his native country, the better, not only for Iran, but for all lovers of cinema in the rest of the world.

Makhmalbaf became a kind of roving ambassador for Mousavi’s Green Movement, giving interviews, writing op-ed pieces, donating his film prizes to the Green Movement, and making the rounds of various European capitals, the European Parliament, and the White House. He says he no longer has time to make films because he is too busy “working for the Iranian people”.

“I am not sure that this means that, five years from now, the Islamic Republic will have been “erased from the face of time,” but I expect that this system will no longer persist as it is currently configured. That won’t be the result of any definitive outside intervention, I believe, but from the mismanagement and misjudgment of Iran’s own hardline leadership.”

It is ironic that institutions like the Vali-ye Faqih, the Sepah, and Basij may be the main obstacles to democratic popular will, but at the same time they are like a glue that hold together a true nest of stinging bees. The fact that these ruling institutions no longer rely on negotiation or compromise with public opinion but only on brute force is a very dangerous sign. Obstinacy, inflexibility, and resorting to brute violence may signal the end of politics and of the possibility of negotiation.

Marking 2nd anniversary of 2009 elections

Rally on June 12 will “test government’s tolerance of protesters”

What measures and strategies are there for the Green Movement to bring to fruition the hopes that this movement has created in the hearts of those who love freedom? On the occasion of the anniversary of the demonstration of millions of people of Iran to reclaim their citizenship and civil rights, TehranReview interviews Iranian theorists and scholars. In the third episode of this series of interviews, we spoke with Mehdi Jami.

Opposition leader and wife temporarily released

Hamid Dabashi is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.His book Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox (Zed Books, 2010) was published in 2010.

Expressing support for “freedom movement of Iran”

“These arrests should not become common practice”

Opposition leaders still under house arrest

“I think the onus for self-criticism is mostly for those outside of the country who spent much of the fall and winter of 1388 (especially around Ashura) presenting a triumphalist message that the Greens were going to out-maneuver the state. Not only did these pundits over-estimate the organizational breadth and coherence of the Green Movement, but they downplayed the agency of the regime.”

Both Iran and Syria reject the accusation

Injustice is the only thing that makes sense to the Iranian regime. It is the only thing with which they can satisfy their sick brain; it is the only thing that makes them feel powerful and alive when they are looking in the mirror. And when they do so, they can only see their own image and not that of people suffocating in the great prison that Iran has become.

“Peaceful protests are not sign of weakness”

The death of the reformist era in Iran is giving birth to a new revolutionary consciousness, a mindset that benefits fundamentally from the reformist era’s emphasis on the civil rights that play such an important emancipatory function in the United States. There cannot be a return to the original reformist attitude any longer.

If not, street protests on March 2

Recognizing ‘the bravery of thousands of Iranians’

Supreme Leader remains silent