with the regime and eventually left Iran; for the last several years he has lived in Europe, where he acts as a spokesman for Iran’s Green Movement.)


As much as he projects an image of wise benevolence in A Moment of Innocence, Makhmalbaf gave a little ammunition to his detractors in the surprising fact that he didn’t allow the policeman to play himself in the film (the actor he used was found in the open auditions seen in Salam Cinema). The cop just wasn’t a good actor, Makhmalbaf told me. When I asked if turning him down wasn’t a bit like stabbing


him a second time, the filmmaker at first laughed uproariously. Then he got serious — I could tell he took the question to be about himself — and said: “The violence that is in our culture is because of ideology and politics. I have ritually washed myself of politics and ideology with art.


“Right now I am a product of myself and my conditions, where when I was a 17-year-old boy I was a product of my conditions. This relative perspective of mine, and my being kind and human, is not a product of my culture. It is a product of the art that I have mastered.”


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