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)
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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.