Daily Inspiration Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

He doesn’t describe landmines as abstract “weapons” or unfortunate collateral; he frames them as a manufactured moral scandal with a return address. The opening move is deceptively simple: “the question in their minds.” Makhmalbaf borrows the viewpoint of Afghans living with the aftermath and uses it to indict the comfortable distance of the “outside world,” sharpening the blame by naming “particularly the Western world.” That “particularly” matters. It collapses the usual humanitarian script (the West as rescuer, donor, fixer) and replaces it with a supply-chain narrative: the same powers that fund aid also industrialize the harm.

The phrase “produce all these landmines, and send them” is intentionally plainspoken, almost childlike, because it makes the transaction impossible to euphemize. Landmines are uniquely obscene for filmmakers: they’re invisible, long-lasting, and indiscriminate; they turn ordinary ground into suspense. By calling it “dirty business,” he targets not just war but the economy around war - the bureaucrats, contractors, and exporters whose hands stay clean precisely because the violence is outsourced and time-delayed.

Contextually, Makhmalbaf emerged from post-revolution Iranian cinema with a strong political conscience, and his work around Afghanistan in the early 2000s leaned into the ethics of spectatorship: what does it mean to watch suffering that others have engineered? The quote’s intent is activist, but the subtext is cinematic: he’s arguing that the real villain isn’t only the battlefield; it’s the factory, the invoice, and the shrug that lets a “horrible device” outlive the war it was built for.