Rakhshan Bani-Etemad

“The characters in my movies, from the very first one up to now, although they are fictional characters, are based on people that I have lived with and that I have come across during my research for movies. They have always been on my mind, and whenever I stop and think about them, I think about what they would be doing now, at this age, at this time. So they’ve never left my thoughts. Even though they were, you know, movie characters, they’re like living people for me, and people whom I know and whom I have touched. I’ve always been thinking about what stage of their life they would be at right now and what they would be up to.”