"We just want to be free."

Via idiomagic


A Letter From Fayah

Through all of this work with Iranian protesters, I have come into contact and become friends with three people there.

For their safety, I can't give you any details of who they are, but I'll give you their names, since they're very common there.

Rashid.

Fayah.

Ali.

Two of them have become very influential on a grass roots level, partially because they are in contact with so many people internationally, and have access to better information than most.

Through many, many email conversations, I have grown to love and admire and deeply respect these people, these friends.

Two of them are planning to deliberately seek martyrdom on Thursday. Here's what Fayah wrote to me:

"I love life. I love to laugh and be with my friends. There are so many books I want to read, movies I want to see, people I want to meet. I want to marry, to be a good wife and mother. I want to grow old with the people I love, to feel the sun on my face, to see the ocean, to travel.

My country is in a terrible state. People have no jobs. There is no money. People have no freedom. Women must hide themselves from the world, and we have no choices.

Our people--we are not terrorists. We hate terrorists. And that is what our government has become. They kill our people for no reason. They torture us in their prisons because we want freedom. They make our country look evil, they make our religion look evil.

We are fighting for our freedom, for our religion, for our country. If we do nothing while injustice abounds, we become unjust. We turn into the ones we hate.

I have to fight. I have to go back on the streets. I will make them kill me. I will join Neda, with my friends, and then maybe the world will hear us.

I never thought I would become a martyr, but it is needed. The more of us they kill, the smaller they become, the more strength the people will have. Maybe my death will mean nothing, but maybe it will buy my country freedom.

I am very sad that I will never be a mother, that I will never do the things I love, but I would rather die than do nothing and know that I am to blame for the tortures, the murder, the hatred.

Please tell the world how much we love life. That we are not terrorists. We just want to be free."

[Note: I have corrected spelling, removed identifying details, and cleaned up the word order a bit...English is her fourth language.]

Please, my friends, remember these names:

Rashid

Fayah

Ali

Please keep them in your thoughts and your prayers.

Gods bless the people of Iran.


If any of you want to reprint Fayah's letter, or disseminate it in any way, please do so. We are her voice, and it needs to be heard.





UPDATED by Kate (the above letter is copied over from idiomagic but the following is my own personal comment:

Because I have been following the situation in Iran since the election, I did not even for an instant understand the above letter to suggest a person about to go out and commit a suicide bombing, but since some have expressed some confusion on this score, due to recent history in the Middle East, I wanted to mention straight out here that the protest movement in Iran sometimes referred to as the Sea of Green is a non violent popular (as in driven by the people) protest movement seeking fair elections and political change in Iran. Just to clarify. idiomagic discusses this more clearly in the comments section below. Thanks!

Final 2008 Film review: and onward into 2009

This one took forever because I kept getting an error message every time I tried to post it. I had to retype by hand. Weird.


Warriors of Heaven and Earth

On paper this had everything I love in an historical film with fantastical elements:

handsome male leads in strong roles (one surely doomed; one you're not sure)

a strong and sympathetic female character (the general’s daughter as calm, competent, courageous, but not--as she would not likely have been in that culture--secretly a ninja warrior; she is a warrior, as it were, in that she takes action and keeps her cool even if she is not a trained fighter)

gorgeous scenery

proper villain and hench-minions

pending war

mystically calm monks with holy relics

loyal followers with "personality" (that is, two dimensional quirks)

a score by A. R. Rahman, of all people

a potentially good plot line in which the two male leads are both honorable but set against each other by circumstance.

I liked it. But I could not help but wonder if the version released in the USA was somehow cut down from a longer and more coherent version. I found it choppy both in the visual and in the plot narration in a way that detracted from the fabulous epic it could have been. And it could have been fabulous. Additionally, it contained an important moral lesson: to quote my spouse, "Don't fuck with the Buddha."

So if you like historical films with a fantastical element, I'd see it. But I don't think it's the movie it could have been, and I'm sorry I didn't get to see that other film. This one came so close.



I'll start the 2009 film reviews with all the movies this year I got from Netflix and didn't finish.