Hatamikia vs Kiarostami

Hatamikia vs Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami, one of contemporary cinema's most celebrated filmmakers, deeply riles the clerics of his native Iran. Most recently, Kiarostami accidentally provoked his hardline detractors by using the word "period" in a Persian sentence, in reference to an epoch of time around the Iran-Iraq War. A hardline cleric in Iran concluded that Kiarostami was conflating Iran's wartime experience with a woman's menstrual cycle, and attacked the director for disrepecting the sacrifice of the Iranian nation during the eight years of "Sacred Defense," the Islamic Republic's religion-infused shorthand for its war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.