Faith & Spirit Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Truth, in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's telling, isn’t a fortress you storm and plant a flag on; it’s shattered glass you mistake for a whole window. By borrowing Rumi’s image of the divine mirror and then stressing the human scramble for its pieces, he’s diagnosing a familiar modern pathology: certainty as a form of visual error. You hold a shard up to the light, it flashes convincingly, and you confuse that glint for total illumination.

The intent is quietly political without sounding like a manifesto. A filmmaker who has lived through revolution, censorship, exile, and ideological whiplash knows how quickly “truth” becomes a prop. The mirror metaphor exposes how grand narratives survive: not by being complete, but by being portable. Each person’s fragment is real enough to comfort them, sharp enough to cut others, and limited enough to demand enemies who “refuse to see.”

The subtext is a rebuke to absolutists and a warning to artists. Makhmalbaf is arguing for humility as an ethical stance: your perspective might be an honest piece of the mirror, but it’s still a piece. Coming from a director, the metaphor also doubles as a theory of cinema. Film is literally the art of reflected light and selective framing; it can reveal, distort, and seduce with the authority of an image. His point lands because it flatters no one: the tragedy isn’t that truth is inaccessible, but that we keep mistaking our angle on it for ownership.