Himself
Kiarostami presents two cases for talking heads to evaluate in terms of morality, rights and responsibilities. Case One: Your son is in class, sitting in the back row. His teacher is writing on the board. A restless student in the back row makes a lot of noise. Not knowing who the culprit is, the teacher makes all the children sitting in the last two rows stay outside of the class until the weekend, unless they tell him who made the noise. After a few days spent outside of the classroom, your son relents and tattles on the boy who made the noise, so he can go back in and continue learning. Was he in the right? Case Two: The other students from the back row wait out the rest of the week outside of the class, before returning. Were they in the right?
self
Gholam-Hossein Saedi was an acclaimed Iranian author, playwright and screenwriter with an oeuvre that contains more than thirty publications. Freedom And Other Maladies depicts Saedi's restless passion and heartbroken demise based on letters that he wrote over the years as well as interviews with his close friends and associates. The documentary film focuses on the last four years of Saedi's life in Paris, at the peak of his suffering, painfully aware that he would die in exile.
