As a director who has experimented with different mediums, including theatre and documentary cinema, I have always relied on living, real materials: people, places, and events that flow directly through life. For years, my work has begun with observation and continued through recording and narration. Yet despite all this, I had never imagined myself in a situation of war. Not because it was impossible, but perhaps because I did not want to. Perhaps there was also a form of unconscious avoidance involved. For an artist living in a turbulent geography such as Iran, this avoidance may seem strange, even difficult to believe. But if I am honest, I must admit that, for complex reasons — a combination of fear, denial, and perhaps a form of self-protection — I kept myself at a distance from the thought of such a situation.
The twelve-day war was more than an external event for me. It felt like a sudden test that forced my mind to adjust to circumstances for which it had never prepared, not even in imagination. During those days, I was filming my previous project in a remote area in southeastern Iran, a place that remained far from the direct Israeli attacks. But geographical distance never meant psychological distance. Being separated from my family, intermittent gaps in communication, and the wave of anxiety that constantly reached me through phone calls and news reports severely disrupted my concentration. Even when I stood behind the camera, part of my mind was elsewhere: in Tehran, beside my loved ones, at the heart of an anxiety I could not physically touch but whose weight I could fully feel.
In the middle of those twelve days, as flights were cancelled one after another, I decided to return to Tehran by road. It was a long and exhausting journey, more like passing through a suspended state: neither completely inside the war nor entirely outside it. When I arrived in Tehran, I encountered a city that felt unfamiliar to me, not because of any physical transformation, but because of the tense and securitised atmosphere moving through it. The city in which I had lived for years now seemed to reveal another layer of itself, a layer I had never seen before.
The final days of that twelve-day war, which I spent in Tehran, passed in continuous anxiety. It was an anxiety that neither reached a climax nor subsided; it simply continued and continued. During those days, my role as an engaged artist was involuntarily reduced to that of an observer. I looked more than I acted. I recorded things mentally more than I recorded them visually. It was as though I was not yet ready for a direct confrontation.
Several months later, however, when the shadow of war once again fell over my city and country amid renewed political and social tensions, something in me had changed. I felt that all those fragmented experiences, unresolved anxieties, and incomplete encounters had accumulated inside me and were now compelling me to move. This time, I no longer wanted merely to watch. I wanted to move, to run, to take my camera and enter the heart of the situation. More than ever before, I wanted to draw close to people and record and narrate their stories under the shadow of war — stories that I knew might disappear forever into isolation if they were not documented.
I had previously placed my camera in front of people who had endured suffering in many difficult situations. Suffering was not unfamiliar to me. But this time, everything had a different quality. People whose lives were affected by war were caught in a profound and immediate contradiction, one that could be seen not only in their behaviour but also in their smallest reactions. On the one hand, they were closer to death than ever before; on the other, they clung to life through the slightest signs and the simplest details.
Everything had become almost too much like a metaphor. Yet this was not a literary metaphor formed only through words. It was a lived metaphor unfolding in reality. The contradictory coexistence of death and life that I had always encountered in literature was now present nakedly before my eyes, within people’s everyday lives. And this made the work more difficult for me.
The more I witnessed these moments, the more sensitive and concerned I became about what my camera was recording. I kept asking myself: Is my camera capable of capturing so much complexity? Can it hold, within a single frame, both the attraction towards nonexistence and the pull towards life? Do I even have the right to enter such profound layers of other people’s experience?
For the first time, I was confronted with a fear I could not define precisely. A fear that was both vague and real. The fear of being incapable or inadequate; the fear that my instrument — my camera — might not be able to record what needed to be recorded in the way it needed to be recorded. At the same time, there was another fear: how far could I go? How far was I permitted to enter the depths of people’s fears and hopes under the shadow of war without violating their invisible boundaries?
These questions are still with me. Perhaps they will never have definitive answers. But I know that after this experience, my relationship with the documentary camera, with storytelling, and even with the act of “seeing” will never be the same again.