"I love all kinds of cinema and have been watching films all my life. If you are a filmmaker and want to be reasonably recognised and successful, your film must either tell stories, have a reflection on society and politics, address issues, engage in known topics or in the avant-garde scene make films with celluloid and insist on film as a holy format. Basically you must make sense and tell something concrete and "safe" in order to be let into establishments and communities. In my case as an experimental filmmaker (this term 'experimental' has so many problems as well) who came from Iran (Middle East) and lives in west, everyone expects you to talk about human-rights issues, political oppressions, stories from your original country as well as entering into celluloid clubs. If you don't talk about these things in your work people think you are not serious about your practice. Whether all of this is right or not- I don't know, and I will never know as I am in a constant state of scepticism. However, I do strongly agree with and believe in this piece of feedback I once got from Max Le Cain, and this basically sums up my position in cinema as a filmmaker: "It struck me more and more that you and Dean use cinema as a tool to investigate the strangeness of existence rather tell stories."
