"Dear Mania, I'm sitting in a pub in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Smiths' song There Is A Light That Never Goes Out is playing in the background so I thought I'd write to you..."
LIFE MAY BE is an epistolary essay film, an exchange of ideas, memories and intimacies between Iranian actress/ director Mania Akbari and Irish writer/ filmmaker Mark Cousins. They meditate - with humour, bruises, darting insight - on exile, dreams, creativity, Forough Farrokhzad, the (naked) body.
"Life may be
A long street through which a woman holding
A basket passes every day.
Life may be
A rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch.
Life may be a child returning home from school..."
(Forough Farrokhzad)
MANIA AKBARI is an actress (she starred in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten), a video artist, and a director whose films include 20 Fingers (2004), One.Two.One (2011), and A Moon For My Father (2019).
MARK COUSINS is a writer and director whose films include The Story of Film (2011), Here Be Dragons (2013), I Am Belfast (2015), and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2018). First Life, Second Life, his meditation on Kiarostami's First Case, Second Case, was published by the Colloquium's Texte und Tone imprint in 2014.
Supported by the Department of English, NYU