Week 6/2025

“I love dollars!” It sounds like the anthem for our times. Today it screeches in stark blue and red, but it has lost its promising ring. The neoliberal ghoul is a balding bank employee, just like the one Johan van der Keuken interviews in his film I Love Dollars (1986). He leans back explaining his theory: “At every moment in time there is the same blood circulating in your body. When you have a cut, some of that blood streams out and your body is generally injured. I am not a physiologist, but if you’d pump more blood into the body, you’d have a very awkward result indeed. Now when we pump too much money into an economy, we get a very awkward result and that is inflation, which impairs the workings of the economic body and leads to wounds.” Van der Keuken confirms: “You can see the body as being inflated.”

In 1980, the year following the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Jocelyne Saab visited the country to understand what the people were living through. Her film has the telling title Iran, Utopia in the Making.

Two years ago, videos of Iranians chanting “Woman, life, freedom” went around the world. With his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof returns to this momentum as if to rekindle the flame that the state apparatus has tried to extinguish ever since. This household drama reveals how a family becomes haunted by the state, represented by a gun tucked in father’s belt. In Spectres of Revolt, Richard Gilman-Opalsky states that a social system should be haunted by the miseries it proliferates, and “it should be haunted by the threat of mutinies on the horizon.” Or much closer to home, in the bedroom of your own daughters…