The Painful Tale of Silence

Iranian artists and cultural figures are living through a strange double experience these days. The closer we come to the geography of Iran, the more bitter and painful it grows; the farther we move from it, the more it turns, at times, into news that brings pride and joy.

Outside Iran, Iranian names are still heard on the world's most important cultural stages. At the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, which ran through August 21, 2026, Asghar Farhadi received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo, and a retrospective of his work was presented in the festival's special program. He has won two Academy Awards, and his cinema has long held a place in international cinema.

In Los Angeles, the exhibition To Share a Stomach has shown another form of the presence of Iranian art. Twenty-five artists in Iran sent their ideas and their instructions for making the work, and twenty-four artists in America carried them out, with varying degrees of collaboration. The project began in March 2026, in the wake of the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, and was completed in five compressed months, through widespread internet blackouts, displacements, and the loss of studios and artworks inside Iran.

The title itself is part of the story. Aram Moshayedi, who organized the exhibition, writes in his introduction that it is his own mistranslation of the Persian word for empathy: the stomach in place of the heart. What crosses the border does not arrive whole. That incompleteness is the exhibition's real subject.

In May 2024, after an eight-year prison sentence and a flogging sentence were upheld against him, Mohammad Rasoulof crossed Iran's mountain border secretly and on foot. Weeks later his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig screened in competition at Cannes and won the jury's Special Prize. A world that had met him at home with prison and lashes stood up for his film and applauded.

But what is happening inside that same geography, which for centuries has been a place where poetry, music, image, and thought were made?

Hiva Seyfizadeh has been sentenced by a court of first instance to four years in prison for a performance at Emarat-e Roobero, and she has appealed the verdict. She says that on that night she sang only a few lines of Saadi in the tradition of Iranian classical singing. In the same case, Houman Memarpanahi, the director of Emarat-e Roobero, has been sentenced to ten years in prison, and Ghazal Nahani, the venue's public relations manager, to seven.

Arya Kasaei and Elaheh Naghilou, two graphic designers, were arrested in July at a meeting held in Kasaei's home with two representatives of the cultural section of the French embassy. They remain in detention. No formal charges have been announced, their place of detention has not been disclosed, and no official account of the status of their case has been provided.

Parastoo Ahmadi released a concert with no audience on the internet. The response was a sentence of seventy-four lashes, a two-year ban on artistic work, and a two-year ban on leaving the country, for her and for eight of the musicians and crew of that performance, each of them separately.

These are only a few among thousands of cases built over the past forty-seven years. Each can be seen as a file of its own, but set side by side they raise a different question: what is it in a song, a graphic design, or a film that can be so alarming?

A society keeps its poetry, hums its songs, watches its films, and commits its images to memory. The problem lies in a structure that has set itself against that society, and the wider the distance between them grows, the more sensitive that structure becomes to the reach of independent voices.

An artist is not necessarily a politician, and art is not necessarily political protest. The power of art lies elsewhere. It can take what thousands have felt separately and turn it into a shared experience. It can find a name for suffering, expose a contradiction, or simply raise a question that stays in the mind after the film, the play, or the song has ended.

And this is what frightens ideological governments: the artist's influence on society.

When a government is confident of its relationship with its people, a song or an image does not threaten its existence. But the more fragile that relationship becomes, the further art is pushed out of the realm of culture and into the realm of security. Then reciting poetry can become a case file, a designer's work meeting can arouse suspicion, and a woman singing before an empty hall can be judged to require punishment.

The loss is not only the artist who is imprisoned, barred from working, or forced to leave. Each time, part of a society's cultural potential is lost with them. The work that is never made, the film that is never shot, the voice silenced before it sings, and the young person who concludes that in order to think and to create they must leave their own land.

And it is precisely here that Iran's border is no longer the end of the matter.

The world has praised Iranian cinema, read its literature, listened to its music, and taken the work of its artists into its museums and festivals. But is praising the result enough, when the source those works came from is under pressure?

Nor are we who stand on this side of the border outside that question.
Every young person made a victim, for their thought, their choices, or their way of speaking, by a structure that has governed Iran for nearly half a century, is not merely a name in distant news. Each of them is our child, and a child of the world. Perhaps tomorrow they might have created something Iran could be proud of, or added something to the cultural and human inheritance of the world. But before any of that, they are a life, and no human life should be sacrificed without cause.

If the success of an Iranian filmmaker at Cannes and Sarajevo is a source of pride for us, then the fate of Iranians and of the young people in that same geography, who are denied the possibility of singing, making, thinking, or even staying, cannot be a matter for others alone.

Perhaps this is the question of our day: how can a world that praises Iranian thought and art so eagerly stay so silent, and so indifferent, while the very source of it is being worn away?