"The aim of the 2005 Green Film Festival is to commemmorate the 50th anniversary of the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki" "Road of Kiarostami" "I wasn't originally interested in landscape or nature photography." "I was more interested in being outside, contemplating my surroundings and spending time by myself." "But every so often I saw a view in exceptional light and it was so beautiful" "that I couldn't bear to watch it alone." "with a simple cameral I recorded some of those moments so as to share an image of nature" "as a sort of souvenir,with friends who had no opportunity to experience it." "I can't say exactly when the subject of roads or ways came to me." "Perhaps I can say when - from the beginning of my photography - but I can't say why - why roads?" "I only know that one day I realised that of the scattered images I had taken over twenty five years, there were over a thousand images" "of roads, tracks and paths." "I think you have to go back to my childhood to find the source of these images," "My fascination with paths must go back to" "that time, since subconsciously the form of the road or the path has reappeared constantly in my film." "One thing that is certain is that these paths carry with them memories from the past" "They are images of the human search that has never been recorded, images from the search for life," "they can be sentimental, or the search for a scrap of bread." "a mess of lines marked, or drawn on the road." "It's clear why the road has always been a favourite subject for poets and writers." "The images appears frequently in classical Persian literature." "in contemporary poetry and Japanese haiku." "For Sohrab, the modern poet, the road is exile, wind, song, travel, and restlessness." "Moonlight shining on a path it cares not to follow" "I struggle down the road heading nowhere" "Or" "Each route carries travellers who" "Each route carries travellers who make slow progress as they rush from side to side" "I hesitate, standing at a fork in the road" "The only way I know is the way of return" "there is no one with me on this road, no one will come." "An autumn gloaming" "I know that one day I would pass this way" "I knew not until yesterday that that day would be today." "From the first he had borne within him a great sorrow which made him flee the company of others and kept him shut away indoors." "It had been so ever since a mourner had told him 'which beautiful face dose not end up buried in dust?" "'" "A great grief settled on him shattering his tranquillity." "People asked of him 'what pains you?" "'" "He told them what had occurred and that his heart was cold at this world." "'Something has come over me." "I know of no way through it and neither books nor decrees yield an answer.'" "They told him that home held no refuge for him, that he must set out down the road keep silence and regard the path:" "'the road itself will yield the answer to your heart's thousand questions.'" "And he went in search of the road." "The road was continuous, without end, a winding road leading no-where." "criss-crossed lines on a page of dust like th lines of a child's game drawn on paper." "People are like ants, in search of their daily bread discovering routes for travel and travel itself." "And last, when he beheld the path, he saw the tale of man:" "that man has one road in life, running from the end to the beginning down which he is endlessly searching for meaning." "and in this boundless existence, each has his own road. sometimes endless, winding, sometimes leading nowhere sometimes a straight line, a path leading to a garden, the shade of a tree, a spring in rocky ground," "The road is the expression of man's journey, in search of provisions" "The road is the illustration of the soul that has no peace and the body is the pack animal of the soul that carries it from place to place" "whoever neglecls his pack animal will never reach his journey's end but the journey of man continues" "Our roads are like ourselves, sometimes stony sometimes paved somtimes winding sometimes straight and the paths we draw on the earth are like scratches upon it" "And we have other ways inside us ways of sadness, ways of joy" "ways of love, ways of thought ways of escape" "and sometimes ways which spring from hatred ways which destroy us, ways which go nowhere" "ways without a conclusion like a stagnant river" "The road is man's confession of the places he id fleeing from the places he is heading the road is life, the road is man and man's road, however small flower on the page of existence" "sometimes without conclusion sometimes victorious." "Dear Lord:" "Give us rain from tame,obedient clouds And not from dense and fiery clouds which summon death." "Amen." "Nahjolbalaqa END"