Ahmad Shamlu: Master poet of Liberty

A documentary about the most important modern Iranian poet and intellectual icon

Executive Producer: Behruz Maghsudlu, Akbar Ghahary.
Director: Moslem Mansouri
Producer: Bahman Maghsudlu
Cinematographers: Mahmoud Kalari, Nezam Kiaie, Faramarz Sarmadi, Nasrolah Sheybani
Film Editing: Zhilla Ipackchi

With: Aida Shamlu, Simin Behbahani, Mahmud Dolatabadi, Mohammad Ghazi, Mohammad Hoghughi, Abbas Kia-Rostami, Javad Mojab, Zia Movahed, Esmail Nuri-Ala, M Sepanlu, Pouran Solatani, Nasser Taghva’i.


A documentary on the life, art and thoughts of the contemporary Iranian poet and writer, Ahmad Shamlu was shown for the first time on April 18 at the behest of the Association of Iranian Writers in Exile. This one-hour documentary, was completed in 1999 and was shown when the Swedish academy gave its highest literary prize to Shamlu, whose poems can be said to have given life to thousands Iranians. The film has also been shown in two North American festivals, CIRA and MESA, and in several universities including Harvard, Columbia, North Carolina, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, Ottawa, and Montreal where it was given critical acclaim.



This was perhaps the first time that the Iranian documentary cinema made a film of a prominent personality and a contemporary poet during their life. Shamlu’s literary works, both poetry and translations, have made him one of greatest cultural and literary influences, particularly on the Iranian left.

 


Shamlu was born in 1925. His life coincided with the period of radical reform in Farsi poetry – a process that began with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-6 and to which Shamlu was a major contributor. Shamlu is prominent both as a great historical literary figure and a major poet. His historic contribution to the reform of Farsi poetry has been a subject of numerous books. But it is his eminence as a national poet that sets him apart as Iran’s offering to world literature. Shamlu’s poetic vision accords with both Western and modernist concepts as well as the modern transformation of classical Farsi poetry. As a humanist and a socially conscious intellectual, he has skilfully woven personal love and affection with social attitudes. His poetry exudes both hope and a passion for justice:


Dry path, all through life
Having been born with a cry
In a hatred
Turning on itself.

Thus was the Great absence.
Thus was
The story of the ruin.

If only freedom
Could sing a song
Small, smaller even ...
Than the throat of a bird.  --  Ahmad Shamlu


-- This film has been selected by the Swedish Academy, CIRA and MESA conferences. It has been shown at University of North Carolina, Miami , Washington DC, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, England, Germany and many other Literature  institute and universities in Europe, Canada and United State. This film also has been shown and praised in the Middle East studies of New York University, Literature Faculty of Harvard, and Berkley in the U.S. and "Stig Dagerman Priset 99" foundation in Sweden. Amazon company has been distributing this film over last few years. --

 
Some quotes from the film


Abbas Kia-Rostami (writer/filmmaker): After 30 years of work… Shamlu has arrived at such credibility in his work that confirmation or denial of anyone can take away, or add nothing, to that credibility.

Zia Movahhed (poet/philosopher): Anyone who reads Fresh air today can see that … this language, this texture, is different from anything else. Poetry without metrical structure… but musical nevertheless… Poetry that does not have prosodic rhythm. But has natural rhythm. In contemporary poetry, few have accomplished this kind of rhythm as Shamlu has. Fresh Air was the greatest event in our poetry – after Hafiz.

Esmail Nuri-Ala (poet/critic/literary historian): If the Persian language was a Latin language, his name would have been familiar to all poetry-reading public in the world… and it would have been a name as great as Neruda and Lorca.

Abbas Kia-Rostami: instead of making any comments about Shamlu’s poems I should just read them, and in this way …. pay my respects and my dues to a poet who… wrote poetry for 30-40 years and lived poetically:

I have never dreaded Death
Though its hands
have always been
 

More fragile than banality;
My fear, however,
was of dying in a land
where grave diggers’ wage
is higher than the price of 

human freedom.

Searching, finding and then
choosing with freedom:

Turning the essence of oneself
into a fort.

Even if there were more value
to death than all this ….

I deny that I had ever
dreaded death.

            -- Ahmad Shamlu


The world is a short stop
In the distance between Sin and hell.
Sun rises as a curse
And the day is an
Irredeemable shamefulness.

O, say something
Before I drown in tears.

The trees are the sinful
Ignorance of the ancestors,
Breeze, a wicked temptation,
The autumnal moonlight,
A blasphemy, soiling the world.

Springs gush out of coffins
And the disheveled mourners,
Are the honour of the earth.

************************

They smell your mouth
To make sure you have not said
I love you.
They smell your mind.
This is a strange time, my dear.

Do not risk thinking.
This is a strange time, my dear.

The one knocking at the door
At night
Has come to kill the light.
You should hide the light
In the closet.

Now, here are the butchers
Stationed at each cross-road
With tree-trunks and cleavers
Dripping of blood.
This is a strange time, my dear.

Surgically,
They put smile on lips
And song in the mouth.
You should hide the joy in the closet.

Canaries roast
On the fire of lilies and lilacs!
This is a strange time, my dear.
The devil drunk with triumph
Celebrates our mourning at his table.
We have to hide G-d In the closet.