Bahman Ghobadi is often referred to as a Kurdish Iranian filmmaker. Yet, he himself avoids this categorization. “I’m a filmmaker, from the Earth. There are thousands of borders but I don’t like to talk about them,” said Ghobadi who experienced a few national conflicts already. At SFS, Ghobadi introduced a quartet of his films, including the Turtles Can Fly.
All four films have an animal in their titles. “I like them more than people. They don’t judge, they don’t ask about your religion, wealth or age. It would be nice if they could go to the cinema, because sometimes I find myself shooting films for them too,” said Ghobadi at the SFS press conference. Animals also occur in the titles of his upcoming projects, one of which has been produced by Martin Scorsese.
While most of Ghobadi’s films deal with the Kurdish minority, the people without homeland, No One Knows About Persian Cats is set in the Teheran underground music scene. “I wanted to show you the real Teheran, the one that you never see in Iranian films. And I also wanted my friends not to consider me a Kurdish separatist. I don’t want to be independent from Iran. I know that if I had been born in Syria or Turkey, I wouldn’t have become a filmmaker.”