I still remember the first time I watched Baran. It was 2001. That film did something rare—it showed us what we already knew but refused to admit: that Afghan migrants were building our cities, stone by stone, and sleeping in their shadows.
In those years, I saw the world behind the fences. I walked through the neighborhoods around the Nawab highway construction in Tehran—right when the regime was throwing concrete and glass into the sky like it was printing its own future. So much money moved through that place, they said it could’ve built a new city from scratch.
Workers were everywhere—digging, lifting, welding. But you could always tell who they were. It was in their faces, their accents, the way they avoided the police. They built Tehran, but they were not allowed to belong to it. Their kids weren’t allowed in school. Every morning I was going to school, and my Afghan neighbor, went to the site with his father. That was normal.
The story was simple. A boy named Latif works in a construction site as a tea server. One day, an Afghan worker named Najaf falls from a building and injures his leg. The next day, his friend brings Najaf’s child to replace him at work. That child is small and quiet—too small for the job. The foreman tries to fire him, but when he learns about the family’s condition, he lets him stay, switching his role with Latif.
Latif is angry. The job was easy, and now he has to carry bricks and cement. He wants the boy gone. He tries to sabotage him. But the boy never speaks—just keeps working. Quiet. Steady. Then one day, Latif discovers the truth: the boy is a girl. Her name is Baran.
That discovery changes something. Latif becomes tender, protective. His anger turns to love, maybe guilt. He begins to help her secretly. And in the end, when she’s forced to leave, he gives up everything he has to support her family.
Baran never says a word. Her silence is the whole point. She becomes a symbol—of pain, of sacrifice, of dignity in the face of humiliation.
But that was cinema.
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Now in 2025, the same Islamic Republic that allowed Baran to be made is trying to deport the real Barans. Parliament has introduced a new plan to remove undocumented migrants—especially Afghans. They ban them from renting homes, now they want to ban them from buying homes and cars. They want to make it illegal for them to work. They are blaming the housing crisis, the bread shortage, even inflation on the backs of Afghan workers and their children.
The recent comments by the head of Iran’s Bread and Flour Task Force, claiming that “ten million Afghan migrants use Iran’s bread subsidies every day,” have sparked wide criticism. He further claimed that Afghans consume more bread than Iranian citizens and proposed the elimination of subsidies as the solution.
The proposed plan would end direct bread subsidies and instead deposit a small amount of cash into household heads’ accounts, forcing bakeries to sell bread at market prices. This same model was tested in the 2000s and led to food inflation, widespread discontent, and protests.
Critics say the narrative of the “over-consuming migrant” is being used once again to justify economic failure. By exaggerating migrant numbers and presenting them as a threat to national resources, officials aim to stir public resentment and make unpopular policies—like cutting bread subsidies—easier to pass.
There is no real data behind these claims. No evidence. Just fear. Just scapegoating. Just power trying to protect itself.
And I can’t help but think of how easy it is for this regime to turn people into ghosts. They gave us Baran as a symbol. But now they want us to forget the real people that film was about. They want to erase their lives, their presence, their voices.
And Majid Majidi? The man who directed Baran—he is not a friend of the people. He defends the same system that censors truth, that silences artists, that has turned Iranian cinema into a shadow of itself.
In those years, men like him were building soft, beautiful lies for international festivals—romantic images of suffering, dressed up as Oriental wisdom. But they never challenged the power that caused that suffering. They told stories without truth. Stories that made pain poetic but left the world unchanged.
Baran showed us something powerful. It showed how propaganda can turn people against each other—how fear, lies, and class resentment can be used to divide. But it also gave us something else: the idea that love, even quiet and unspoken, can replace hate. That was the heart of the film. That was what the Islamic Republic sold to Western festivals at the time—this image of pure, poetic love rising above division. But behind the camera, the same regime was stripping Afghan people of their humanity. And now, it has taken that dehumanization to its highest level.
And where are those voices now—the ones who once called this kind of cinema “authentic,” who packaged it as part of some noble Eastern or Iranian culture? The ones who dismissed every cry from inside Iran as “propaganda”? Now that Afghan families are being pushed out of their homes, now that the state is turning migrants into enemies of the nation, these same defenders of cultural authenticity are silent.
In place of that so-called love and purity stands a regime that believes in nothing. That values no one—not Afghans, not Iranians.
But Iranians also want to speak for themselves. They want their own will, their own future. Yet it seems they are still expected to wait—for permission from those who once sold false culture to the West, and from Western liberals who bought it.
Now the pain is real. It’s not symbolic. It’s not silent. Afghan children are being kicked out of homes. Afghan women are being threatened. Families are being torn apart in the name of “economic control.”
If Baran was silent, the real Barans of today are being forced into a silence that is far more violent. And I wonder what kind of country tells a child: you can die building it, but you can never live in it.
What you think?