Or how I learned to love the art and reject politics
I want to reflect on the narrow, uneasy space between creating art that engages with political realities and turning art into a political instrument. Worse still is the moment when the artist becomes the story rather than the story the artist means to tell. Through lived experience, I’ve come to believe that art should illuminate human lives, not the artist’s political posture. It is a fine line, one that can harden into a razor’s edge suspended over a pit of snakes and scorpions.
These are personal reflections, not a manifesto or an indictment of other artists. They belong here, on my own blog, for whoever is curious about how I see the world. I am writing as someone whose life has been shaped by cinema, and whose birthplace Iran, has remained present in my work even as I’ve lived most of my life elsewhere. Engaging with Iran’s struggles from afar has demanded constant vigilance. In my experience, there is only a narrow passage between being politically aware and slipping into a kind of political commoditization of one’s own art. I’ve tried to confront political realities without letting my work become a partisan mouthpiece, or letting my public identity as an artist drag me into ideological arenas I neither seek nor claim expertise in.
For me, one thing is steady: ideology and partisanship corrode the artistic impulse. Keeping art separate from ideology is foundational to how I approach my work. This isn’t a principle I impose on others; it is simply the ground I stand on. The tension itself is nothing new. Renaissance artists wrestled with the same contradictions; Caravaggio’s turbulence, Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, and the patronage systems that demanded loyalty while punishing candor.
From my own small perch in that same unruly tree, I’ve faced similar dilemmas. The three films I made in Iran; One More Day, Secret Ballot, and The Silence Between Two Thoughts, were my way of engaging with the country’s political and human narratives without turning the work into political currency. Later, while making the documentary 752 Is Not a Number, I confronted a different danger: the risk of author and subject collapsing into the same figure, the ease with which a filmmaker can become consumed by the tragedy he is documenting. And during the Green Movement of 2009, I stood with what I understood to be the people’s democratic aspirations while refusing the partisan slogans that came with them. In a climate thick with fervor, holding that line is harder than it sounds. But it preserved the integrity of the work, and of my own artistic compass.
Since the Constitutional Revolution, Iranian society has been caught in malformed ideological and partisan currents. Artists have stood on every side of this struggle, often unaware of how deeply ideology has seeped into their tools and intentions. In that landscape, the artist is constantly pulled toward becoming a political actor; worse, ideology begins shaping the very work itself. Many Iranian artists have become casualties of this environment, where noise overwhelms signal and artistic meaning is drowned in political mud.
Working inside an authoritarian system magnifies the risk. Persecution, censorship, and propaganda all conspire to drag the artist into the spectacle. The more one responds, the tighter the web becomes. Authoritarian regimes recognize only ideological scaffolding; they relate to art only through domination or exploitation. They entice artists into becoming mere instruments or persecute them into silence, and, in Iran’s case, too often into physical elimination. Many artists cannot maintain their footing. They slide into the whirlwind of politics and ideological entanglement, exactly where the tyrant wants them: contained, neutralized, instrumentalized, or erased. This is where ideology and art reveal themselves as fundamentally incompatible, like oil and water. The boundary between them is the razor’s edge on which many artists fall.
When I was able to make films in Iran, I felt compelled to tell the stories that barely had room to exist. The prisoner yearning beyond the walls in One More Day. The illusion of democracy, rendered through mechanisms of fascism in Secret Ballot. The first fissures in religious dogmatism in The Silence Between Two Thoughts. When the system descended on me in 2003, confiscating my film, arresting me, that was the fork in the road that still defines my thinking today. Because once the art becomes about the artist’s ordeal, it risks overshadowing the very realities the work was meant to illuminate. You don’t need to know what Michelangelo, Bernini, or Caravaggio endured for their work to touch you. For me, the art must speak for itself, even when the artist is absent, forgotten, or irrelevant to the politics of the moment.
Authoritarian regimes only deepen the trap, creating a spiraling cat-and-mouse game in which artist, audience, and state all become entangled in a spectacle that has little to do with art. The conflict accelerates, and the work risks being reduced to a pawn. In my life, that conflict became the central challenge of making films under such circumstances, during those turbulent five years in Iran, and in the years that followed.
In the end, it comes back to the old journalistic cliché: the journalist should never become the story. Likewise, the artist must allow the work and whatever truths it carries, to remain the focus, not the artist’s political narrative or the suffering endured to get there.