Love Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Makhmalbaf is talking about cinema less as an art-form and more as an exit hatch. The line carries the pressure of someone who knows what it means to live in a culture where speech is managed - by the state, by tradition, by family expectation, by the quiet economics of who gets to be heard. In that environment, self-expression doesn’t disappear; it reroutes. Film becomes the smuggling route: images can say what sentences can’t, stories can hint where direct statements would trigger punishment or dismissal.

The phrasing "so little room" is doing heavy political and social work without naming a censor. It’s not just about banning content; it’s about narrowing the everyday bandwidth for being fully human. When public language is policed, the private self starts looking for a medium that can hold contradiction, ambiguity, and deniability. Cinema excels at that. You can couch critique in metaphor, tuck dissent into character, let the camera linger on a detail that the official narrative would rather erase. You can claim you’re only telling a story while everyone understands the story is about them.

There’s also a democratic bite to "a lot of people": this isn’t auteur mysticism. He’s describing a mass hunger. Cinema becomes a shared outlet, a communal dream-space where viewers practice feelings and ideas that real life won’t permit. In Makhmalbaf’s world, loving film isn’t escapism; it’s a form of survival and, quietly, resistance.