It is a long way from one life to another, as Yiyun Li writes in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, but, she also asks, if not for that distance for what do we write? We constantly find ourselves not able to get access to (the full intensity of) someone else’s pain that seems to have a life of its own, sometimes stronger than our capacities for understanding. But if not for reaching that pain, indeed, what do we write poetry or make films for in the darkest moments of our grievance?

Therefore in this event we are featuring Iranian poetry and cinema in an attempt to attend to these. Given the  geopolitical time like the one we are living in, we constantly bump into our own pain and other’s pain, caught between traumas, massacres, wars, ideologies, and regimes, shell-shocked by horrible events unfolding in other places or other times. Against the backdrop of the recent violence and war in Iran and the wider West Asia, the event turns to poetry and cinema as ways of confronting grief, witnessing and longing.

During this event, we are reading Iranian Feminist poet and film-director Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “Let us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season” and “Another Birth” and screening Iranian filmmaker Mehrshad Golkarian’s short film Birthmarked. In the film, the 14-year-old girl Fatemeh read a poem she wrote to her younger brother. Among all the words she used, the boy was particularly interested in the word hijran, loosely translated into English as yearning. Where does hijran lead “my sister”? Or generally anyone who dares or longs to yearn? In the roundtable discussion following the film-screening, we discuss three scenes in the movie : “what does yearning mean,” “plant hands in the garden,” and “my sister’s hiding spot”.