Schema Magazine

"And the Golden Globe goes to..." deafening silence fills the auditorium as the nominees become fidgety in their seats "...from Iran, A Separation," Madonna reads out loud. As the camera pans over the crowd, some familiar smiling faces become unfamiliar, as the film's two delegates make their way to the stage to accept their award.

Yes, you heard correctly: Iran! It's that big bad bogyman country you often hear about in TV, led by a gang of smirking mullahs dancing their way towards world destruction with the help of their 'under-the-rug' nuclear program. Well, other than knowing how to make the front-page news almost everyday, they also know how to make some good movies.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation won the best foreign language film in one of world's biggest stages. This comes as a continuation of the film's previous success with winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival last year.

True. I plead guilty—I am an Iranian and I see this as a colossal victory. A Separation is a film that stands as a prime example of how vibrant the Iranian art scene has grown to be. But I'm not here to talk about the aesthetically pleasing merits of the film itself as much as its political and social consequences.

Now for a bit of contextualization: Iran, ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, has been often antagonized on the international stage for its 'un-friendly' foreign policy and nature of governance. With its enormous amount and variety of economic goodies (oil being one of them) and its towering influence in the region, Iran is a country that just can't be ignored. Especially over the past decade, Iran has become a popular political punching bag over its 'unjust' ambitions for a robust nuclear program, which, sadly enough, has resulted in the suffocation of the Iranian people (and not the regime) with waves of strangling economic sanctions.

What does all this have to do with the Golden Globes? Well, I choose to be a dreamer this time and I want to be able to say to the hell with the politics, economics and all the demoralized approaches to this whole mess. Lets talk art. Lets see this win as a birth of a colourful medium in where nothing holds value but that of genuine ideas and inspiring images; a medium that would break this 'Iran Vs. All' dichotomy and further nurture creativity towards more peaceful ends!

To conclude his brief speech up on the podium, director Farhadi concluded by saying: "I just prefer to say something about my people...they are truly peace loving people."