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The Buddhas Had To Be Destroyed By The Taliban To Get The World Thinking About Afghanistan.

-Mohsen Makhmalbaf

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The Buddhas Had To

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

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The Buddhas Had To Be Destroyed By The Taliban To Get The World Thinking About Afghanistan.

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From 7 In The Morning To 11 At Night, I Was Reading. I Don't Think One Can Find Any Other Time In One's Life To Be Left Alone So Much To Read In Peace Like That.

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The Question In Their Minds Was, Why Did The Outside World, And Particularly The Western World, Produce All These Landmines, And Send Them To Afghanistan? This Business Must Be Stopped. It's A Dirty Business To Produce Such A Horrible Device.

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From My Films, You Can At Least Learn About Iran, You Can Get A Sense Of The History And The Society. But No Such Films Have Been Made About Afghanistan, So You Really Can't Know Much About It.

Do You Know That Every Day, 10 People In Afghanistan Are Injured By Landmines? It Will Continue For The Next 50 Years, Because The Country Has The Largest Number Of Landmines In The World.

Rumi, Who Is One Of The Greatest Persian Poets, Said That The Truth Was A Mirror In The Hands Of God. It Fell, And Broke Into Pieces. Everybody Took A Piece Of It, And They Looked At It And Thought They Had The Truth.

I Was In Jail Four And A Half Years. When I Came Out, I Continued The Same Struggle Against Injustice, But Instead Of Using Weapons, I Began To Use Art And Cinema.

I Myself Had To Grow A Longer Beard And Afghan Clothes. I Was In Danger Of Being Kidnapped By Smugglers, Though I Didn't Know It At The Time.

I Wanted To Be Left Alone To Live My Life, So It Was Very Easy For People To Pretend That They Were Me.

When We Began Filming, These People Had Legs, But As We Were Filming, They Had Been Injured And They Were Brought To The Hospital To Have Their Legs Amputated, And That's Where We Found Them And Asked Them To Come And Be Part Of The Film.

It Was Really Bizarre, That Sabzian Business. You Know I Had No Interest In Being Photographed Before This Incident. But Then Not Just Sabzian—many Other People Started Pretending They Were Me! One Of Them Actually Got Married While Pretending He Was Me! My Face Became Publicly Recognizable Soon After I Decided To Have A Few Photographs Of Me Available In Public To Prevent These Sorts Of Identity Thefts. It Is Really Pathetic, If You Think Of It. Filmmakers And Filmmaking Is So Popular In Iran Because All Other Forms Of Expression Have Been Denied To People.

Because There Is So Little Room For Expression Otherwise, A Lot Of People Love Cinema Because They Find It A Way Of Expressing Themselves.

There's An 800 Kilometer Border Between Iran And Afghanistan.

But Also, There Are No Films Being Made About Afghanistan.

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The Buddhas Had To Be Destroyed By The Taliban To Get The World Thinking About Afghanistan.

When I Came Out, And For Many Years Afterwards, It Had Become A Habit For Me To Sit And Read And Read And Read, Like An Obsession. I Would Take 20 Books, And Not Come Out Until I'd Finished Them. It Took Me A While To Change That Habit.

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