open letter from Jafar Panahi at the opening of the 61st International Film Festival of Berlin
"The world of a filmmaker is made of the plot between reality and dreams. The filmmaker uses reality as a source of inspiration, he painted in the colors of his imagination and makes films that are a projection of his hopes and dreams.
The reality is that over the past five years I was forbidden to make movies that have now been officially sentenced to be deprived of this right for twenty years. But I know that my imagination will continue to transform my dreams into movies. As a socially conscious filmmaker, I recognize that I am no longer able to represent the concerns and the daily problems of my people, but I do not deny the possibility to dream that in twenty years all those problems will be gone, and I will make films on peace and on the prosperity of my country when I have the chance to do it again.
The reality is that I was deprived of the opportunity to think and write for the next twenty years, but could not prevent the dream of the inquisition and intimidation that twenty years have given way to freedom and free thought. I have been deprived of the opportunity of seeing the world for the next twenty years. I hope that when I'm free, I can travel in a world without geographical barriers, ethnic and ideological, in which people live together in freedom and peace, whatever their beliefs and their convictions.
I was sentenced to twenty years of silence. Yet in my dreams, scream for it to be a time when we can tolerate each other, respect each other's opinions and experience for each other. The reality of my sentence, then, is that I spend six years in prison. For the next six years will live in hope that my dreams come true. I hope that the filmmakers from all corners of the earth realize that film so beautiful, when I am out of prison, I will want to continue living in the world who have imagined in their works.
So from now on, and for the next twenty years, I will be forced to remain silent. I will have to not be able to see, I will be forced not to think, can not be forced to make movies. I submit myself to the reality of prison and those who keep me prisoner. I will try in your film, the manifestation of my dreams, hoping to find in them what they are deprived "
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