In December 2021, the issue of Internazionale’s Stories was dedicated to Iran. In the presentation, the writer Mohammad Tolouei described his fellow citizens as a people who survived the contradictions: “We have had the longest-lived empires in history, we have an endless past behind us, but what can we say about the present? Society is now in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Young people want to leave the country. It is joked that one in five employees at NASA is of Iranian origin and that we would all like to move to the United States, the country that has been our sworn enemy for decades. We live in contradictions, divided between what we are and what we would like to be and this has made us stronger ”.
He himself remembers being born three months after the 1979 revolution, and in his books he tells how that event changed the life of his family but also that of subsequent generations. Tolouei lives in Iran, but other writers, directors or intellectuals have been forced into exile and can tell about a country they can only imagine.
Mohammad Tolouei will be in Ferrara on 2 October with the Iranian Bita Malakuti, writer and poet, and Mozhde Nourmohammadi, director and photographer. She introduces and moderates the researcher Giacomo Longhi.