Time & Perspective Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

There is a quiet provocation in Makhmalbaf's claim: not that cinema can explain a nation, but that without cinema a nation becomes illegible. He’s pitching film as a kind of public memory system - an accessible archive where history, manners, and political weather get stored in images the world can actually retrieve. The sentence flatters Iran a little (it has stories, it has a record, it has directors) and indicts Afghanistan a lot (it has been denied the machinery that turns lived reality into shareable narrative).

The intent isn’t purely nationalistic; it’s infrastructural. Makhmalbaf is pointing at an asymmetry in cultural production that mirrors geopolitical ones. Iran, despite censorship and upheaval, has an internationally legible art-house tradition. Afghanistan, battered by war, displacement, and the systematic disruption of institutions, has had fewer chances to build a continuous film culture - and fewer opportunities to export one. The result is a vacuum filled by outsiders: news footage, military documentaries, and stereotype-ready images that treat the country as an event rather than a society.

The subtext is also a defense of his own project. He’s arguing that Iranian cinema does more than entertain; it offers a counter-narrative to the usual headlines. But he’s careful with the hedge: “at least” concedes cinema’s limits while still asserting its value. The grim punchline lands in the final clause - “you really can’t know much about it” - less an insult to Afghanistan than a warning about what happens when a place is seen only through other people’s lenses.