"If I make two films in a year, they'll be different. This is my style - I can't have just one way"
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Restlessness, framed as craft. Makhmalbaf isn’t bragging about range so much as refusing the safest contract cinema offers: a recognizable “signature” that audiences can buy and industries can package. When he says two films in a year “will be different,” he’s pushing back against the idea that consistency equals seriousness. For him, repetition isn’t mastery; it’s complacency.
The subtext is political as much as aesthetic. In Iranian cinema, style isn’t just a creative preference; it can be a survival strategy. A fixed mode becomes legible to gatekeepers, censors, and festival circuits alike. By insisting “I can’t have just one way,” Makhmalbaf claims motion as freedom: the ability to change form, tone, and narrative tactics before anyone can pin him down. That volatility reads like an artist’s temperament, but it also functions like evasion - a way to keep making work under shifting pressures, whether ideological scrutiny at home or expectation abroad.
There’s also an argument here about speed. Two films a year suggests urgency, not luxury. Makhmalbaf’s cinema has often felt like it’s in dialogue with history as it’s happening - a filmmaker responding to social conditions, personal evolution, and moral uncertainty in real time. The line turns “style” inside out: not a look, a palette, or a recurring motif, but an ethic of change. His brand, paradoxically, is refusing to become one.
The subtext is political as much as aesthetic. In Iranian cinema, style isn’t just a creative preference; it can be a survival strategy. A fixed mode becomes legible to gatekeepers, censors, and festival circuits alike. By insisting “I can’t have just one way,” Makhmalbaf claims motion as freedom: the ability to change form, tone, and narrative tactics before anyone can pin him down. That volatility reads like an artist’s temperament, but it also functions like evasion - a way to keep making work under shifting pressures, whether ideological scrutiny at home or expectation abroad.
There’s also an argument here about speed. Two films a year suggests urgency, not luxury. Makhmalbaf’s cinema has often felt like it’s in dialogue with history as it’s happening - a filmmaker responding to social conditions, personal evolution, and moral uncertainty in real time. The line turns “style” inside out: not a look, a palette, or a recurring motif, but an ethic of change. His brand, paradoxically, is refusing to become one.
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