Mehdi Yarmohammadi’s Speech at the Sahar Manchester Festival

Mehdi Yarmohammadi — secretary and founder of the Independent Khorshid Film Festival, director of the Independent Short Film Support Base, and jury member at the previous edition of the International Sahar Festival in Manchester — was recently invited to speak on the future of cinema at the third edition of this international festival in England. He has published the text of his speech as follows:
On “The Future of Cinema”
Cinema has had a life full of peaks and valleys since the very moment it was born. From entertainment to travel writing, from conjuring up fantasy worlds to documenting the lives of different peoples. From industry to art, and from negative film to digital.
But today, after all these years, cinema has come of age. It has stepped beyond the boundaries of storytelling and realism and entered the world of video art and experimental expression. A world belonging to thinkers and intellectuals who no longer see cinema as mere entertainment and spectacle, but rather as the ideal medium for redefining the fundamental concepts of this century and offering the theories that people in today’s world need. And this is what cinema’s maturity looks like — cinema has arrived somewhere good. It has pulled into the station of experimental cinema, a place that I believe will live through some truly important years at this juncture.
In fact, the role of experimental cinema as the main path of impactful, trend-setting filmmaking — encompassing the full range of all its elements — functions in today’s world as a think tank. A think tank for expressing the ideas, thoughts, and perspectives of thinkers who intend, in a creative way and based on their own personal experience and understanding — which is undoubtedly a vital part of anthropology — to make the world a better place to live and guide society toward a civilization worthy of human beings.
A civilization built on the redefinition of concepts that were once called foundational — and whose proper understanding today represents the central challenge facing modern humanity.
A humanity in the throes of an identity crisis, searching for new and contemporary meanings of the close-up, and of other frame sizes and formats of tragedy, fantasy, comedy, and beyond — boldly and fearlessly dissolving the boundaries between philosophy, psychology, anthropology, physics, music, painting, graphic arts, performance, and cinema, in order to breathe new life into the study of humanity through the medium of film.
Today, experimental cinema is moving toward auteur art — a multidimensional art form whose author is a thinking artist, one who intends, through the specific subject of their film or through offering a fresh angle on an issue or problem, to present a theory to the world.
And the future of cinema belongs to these thinking artists — those who, with extraordinary intelligence and sharpness, and through the right choice of subject and their distinctive perspective on it, are the pathfinders of modern anthropology.
The cinema of the future is waiting for thinkers to come and, within their personal cinema — artistically and on the basis of their unique studies, explorations, research, understanding, and experience — leave the world a more lovable and hopeful place for those who come after.
I’d like to close with something brief — a poetic message I wish to send to all the filmmakers of the world:
“Dear filmmaker, I speak to you from the ground… I live here…
Today’s world is a world of war, a world of competition, a world of I-am-better-than-you… a world of the ambitions of those who are, in truth, no better than you. I know this well…
I also know that you have taken refuge in the star-filled, luminous sky of your dreams… But…I want to invite you back down to earth… To stand beside the people who still drink water, still breathe, and still miss you… Those who still smile back at the small smile that is born in your film… Those who have still not forgotten spring for the smell of its flowers in your films…
Hello… Welcome to the earth…
This is the place where you and I must build it together, hand in hand… This is where its people search for the address of hopes and beauties in your films and mine…
Look… Where have you hidden your beautiful dreams inside your films?
Rise, and turn your eyes toward spring, so that the spring breeze may wash the sorrow from your eyes…
Build your most beautiful dreams — perhaps the earth will grow beautiful in the mirror of your beautiful dreams… Rest assured that in reward for this beauty, the sky will come down to visit the earth…
Cinema is waiting for you to come, bringing with you your most beautiful dreams…
With respect to all the filmmakers of the world.”
Mehdi Yarmohammadi