In 1995, in connection with the celebrations of cinema’s centenary, Makhmalbaf, a leading figure in the new wave of Iranian cinema, decided to make a film, placing an ad in the press to hire a hundred actors and actresses. Around 5,000 people turn up for the auditions, which led to riots and various accidents and mishaps.

During the auditions, candidates expressed their love of cinema while commenting on the concerns, ambitions, and contradictions that govern their daily lives, such as women made invisible by political power.

Ultimately, this eulogy to cinema, which premièred internationally at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995, straddles the fine line between fiction and documentary to reveal the potential of film as a means of communicating and revealing silenced realities, particularly in societies where freedom of expression is restricted.

To talk about the themes evoked by the film, we invited Jihan El Tahrit, who has worked on the identities of the modern African and Arab worlds, and Esther Leslie, whose research has explored art’s response to liberating revolutionary situations and its instrumentalisation by authoritarian regimes.