In this surreal world, Americans and Australians get to see Jafar Panahi's latest film Crimson Gold before Iranians (if it's ever shown here). On the same site, Deep Breath (another Iranian film) is reviewed, and the film Paradise is somewhere else is showing at the Karlovy Vary festival. Kiarostami is visiting the Melbourne festival:

"One of the reasons we pursued quite vigorously to have Kiarostami to come to Australia is because our view of the Middle East is completely 'media-tised'," [the director] said.

"It's important to bring him in here to say, if nothing else, there is a rich cultural life in Iran."

The last sentence has two interpretations: I could twist it to mean "even if there is no other kind of life in Iran, a rich cultural life exists"!

Yesterday I saw A house built on water which I thought was pretentious. It pushes the boundaries of acceptability, so a heavily censored version was shown.