I Went to Iran Last Night

While everyone is going to be talking about the Super Bowl today, I am going to go another route.  I want to talk about the movies: and one in particular– A Separation.

If you haven’t seen the ad campaign hyping it for an Academy Awards later this month, then you must have been living under a rock. A Separation is the Iranian film – their version of Kramer versus Kramer, only with a murder charge involved.

I went to this film expecting to dislike the characters and most importantly dislike the society in which they live.  The ad campaign showed snippets of a judge making a sentence and I was rally prepared not to like him or their criminal system. Instead I was surprised.

While not a big fan of the ruling regime in Iran, the people showed the exact same issues and personalities as those found here in the U.S. That in itself was not the surprise.  The surprise was my reaction to them.  I actually had empathy for them.  There is a grandfather with Alzheimer’s disease, who, while not saying a word, steals the show for me.  I felt so much for his care-giving son and the family surrounding the old man. The tensions that his care and constant need brought on led to the high drama in the film.  And as it was played out in front of me, the judicial system that the problem was to deal with the drama, seemed very streamlined and very fair. (No lawyers were involved.  To my good legal buddies, Woodfin, Echols and Downs, I am sorry, but that’s how their system works.)

The accusing parties are sitting in a small room together arguing their points in front of a judge who very calmly writes down the facts as he hears them, then passes sentence.  In many ways the laws of the land tie his hands, but he has a great deal of empathy for the accused, as well as the accuser. (It is a complicated story that I will not ruin for you here.)

Suffice it to say, the judge has to make a hard decision– a decision that will affect two families in a profound way.  In the short time he on the screen you can see the stress on his face which he must deal with in acting out his role in daily life.

What I walked away from this movie with, is that should we have to go to war with Iran (and you can hear the sabers rattling all the way to the White House and across the pond in Israel) I can see these people as humans.  Not an enemy as we once portrayed Russians and Chinese during the Cold War, but rather as people caught up in a system and swept along everyday in their lives by the same tribulations faced by folks in Texas, Arkansas, Ohio, California, Vermont and even Alaska. They are humans caught under the rule of law that they may or may not agree with, but a rule of law that they support by living with it.

It is a hard film to watch in many ways, but one that I think serves a good purpose. Iranians face the same problems as you and I. And they muddle through life just as we do.  And their leaders screw up just like ours do. They are not evil, even if they are not Baptist or Methodist.

They hurt like us.  They laugh like us.  And they feel just like we do. (Okay we take better care of women than they do, but not always…) 

In short, I walked out of that theater a bit wiser about the people of Iran, maybe because I discovered something of myself in their plight.