You went through the revolution in 1979. You must have seen a lot of changes in Iranian society then. For such a sensitive observer, that must have had a great impact on you.

At the time of the revolution I was 18-years-old. I was one of those who came to the streets and participated in the demonstrations that would lead the schools to closure. We thought then that we were achieving a great goal. We were nae’ve of the fact that any revolution in the world that is ideology-based can lead to tyranny and dictatorship. Such a revolution won’t tolerate dissent, or alternative thoughts and ideas’and this impacts on all issues’social, economic, political and the rest.

Your films have made me think about contemporary Iranian society as they are one of the only windows I have into your country’apart from news media. They talk about children and women, and society. With the election of President Khatami in 1997 there was a lot of talk of supposed ‘reform’. Now Iran is largely a young society’there are more young people than there are old people. There’s a new generation who have a different relation to what came before the revolution. Two characters in Crimson Gold come to mind as examples’the 15-year-old soldier who has an unrealistic sense of what life was like before; and the bachelor, who is just as alienated as Hussein. The bachelor has been in America and on his return, finds he can no longer relate to the Iran he left behind. Can you talk to that?

As you stated, Iranian society is a young society. The young have difficulty in adjusting to what is going on around them. They have a more modern outlook; however, their fate is in the hands of 15 per cent of the population who are traditionalists’those who have no regard for their aspirations. The young are the people who think of peace, like the girl (from Offside) who says that ‘I had to be born in Japan so that I could go to the stadium to watch the game.’ The young want the rights that are enjoyed by the rest of the world. Of course, everywhere in the world, all societies have problems of their own. Some Iranians were born outside of Iran and raised up outside, and they endeavour to do something to contribute to their society. But they are in doubt as to which direction to choose’they are at a crossroad.

Unfortunately Khatami’s promise of reform remained merely a slogan. His government was saying good things’at the level of superficial reform’but Khatami didn’t want to go deeper into real reform for Iran. Superficial reforms may produce effects but the effects are transient and momentary. What you see of Iran in the media around the world is a portrayal of the 15 per cent of the population with power. However, the ordinary people of Iran are the ones that you see in my films. And they are the ones who would like to remove the boundaries placed around them. But in doing so, they don’t want to harm anybody. They even want to make friends with their guards (if they are prisoners), because the guard is one of them, not someone different.

Your films seem to convey a particular humanity about Iranian society. In the West, it’s a lot about difference and opposition. But as you say in your films, the guards and the police are not good or bad, they’re just people. There’s a degree of solidarity’would you say that?

Militaristic films always portray soldiers as someone to be afraid of and there are always some bad people that have to be annihilated. However, the prevalent thinking among the intellectuals and people in our society is far from that. They are equally upset about what is happening in Lebanon as much as what happened in 2001 in America, and what is happening now in Iraq. They always have a global message. If they are talking about nationalism, they never mean it to be regarded as chauvinistic ideology.

They are talking about a renaissance’a resurgence of the civilisation that is deep-rooted within Iran. They want to revive that glamour. It is like what happened during the time the Church ruled in the Middle Ages and the way the Europeans looked at their past to get out of that era. The song that Offside ends with has the same message.

In this new national song, there is no mention of the regime or of the government. Rather it talks about the purity and the goodwill of the Iranian nation. It talks about Iranian art, without dependence on anything else around the world. All of the words are Persian, not even Arabic. The song conveys a message of peace. It says that we are a nation that is very much alive and wants to live in peace with others.