Medium of Love

The extraordinary story of an Iranian cleric, Ali Afsahi, who preaches the love of cinema. To prove his point, he shows The Fifth Element and Natural Born Killers to a group of his colleagues, who sit round the video taking notes - soberly. After the revolution, Afsahi convinced the ayatollahs to allow him to set up film studies programmes at religious centres. After 1984 he gave up his own religious activities to concentrate on movies. Unfortunately he later fell victim to conservative elements, he was imprisoned and vilified in print. Afsahi quotes Bergman: 'Hell is like meeting someone who doesn't understand you.' Safari's film is a confusing on basic chronology (how long was Afsahi imprisoned? how did he get out?), but it's another revealing slant on the paradoxes at the heart of Iranian cinephilia.