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How Taghvai’s Cinema Teaches Us to Replace Paranoia with Practice
Nasser Taghvai, a renowned Iranian filmmaker and creator of enduring works, who for years resisted censorship and chose seclusion rather than making films under official policies, has passed away at 84. He was a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave and, at the same time, widely known to the public for his popular works. His legacy shaped my generation through “Captain Khorshid”—a creative adaptation of Hemingway—and the generation before mine through “My Uncle Napoleon.” In Iran, Nasser Taghvai’s work cuts through the fog of easy explanations. “My Uncle Napoleon” skewers the reflex to blame a hidden enemy for every bruise…
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Political Maturity in an Age of Binaries
Ignorance is not harmless once it walks into the street. I learned that in 2004, watching Iranian football fans do a Nazi salute to German players, not out of ideology but out of emptiness — no history, no memory, no sense of what that gesture meant. Today I see a similar emptiness in parts of European solidarity with Palestine. Many people are sincere and right to oppose genocide, blockade, occupation. But around them there is a louder layer that repeats a second-hand story of “resistance” and ends up whitewashing a religious, authoritarian project. For people who have actually lived under…
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Iran’s New ‘Hijab Situation Room’ and the Failure of Control
On Friday, October 17, 2025, the secretary of Tehran province’s “Enjoining Good & Forbidding Wrong” headquarters, announced a new “Situation Room for Chastity & Hijab,” alongside the organization and activation of “more than 80,000 trained volunteers” plus 4,575 trainers and judicial auxiliaries (“zabet-e qazaei”). Officials framed it as a cultural-social campaign run with “cultural and security” bodies. This isn’t rumor; multiple Iranian outlets carried the remarks. Is this the morality police by another name? Not exactly—but it’s meant to do similar work through a different architecture. The “Setad” in question is a policy/coordination body that operates countrywide under the 2015…
