Iranian Film Festival - San Francisco®

Salam Iran, A Persian Letter

 Director: Jean-Daniel Lafond ~ 72 minutes ~ Canada

“I first traveled to Iran with Amir, without ever leaving Montreal. Until the day when a new wind of hope sprang up across Tehran. After 18 years in exile, Amir had decided to return home. And I, to make a film. What seemed at first like a simple story quickly turned complex. In a country where the dead and martyred are more alive than the living, where the past is more present than the present, and where the invisible overwhelms the visible, everything could happen. Women fighting for their rights, a younger generation seething with frustration, democrats locked in political combat... all embody a thirst for freedom and a hunger for life which the conservative Mollahs in power can no longer contain. Today, in Iran, the revolution has deepened the cleft between an obscurantist Islam terrified by fear of the wave and an Islam open to the world, prepared to plunge into the wave of modernity that sets words and bodies free...”