With Love and Pain

You may tell yourself it shouldn’t make a big difference. You may be very much mindful not to let your care or respect waver because of that. You may go about the whole shoot just as you have done quite a few times by now, with such different people.
And yet, when you take a break, waiting for the dusk, there is a sort of ease to it. A sort of ease you haven’t felt for years. A sort of understanding you had almost forgotten.
You just sit next to each other, staring at the canal, and don’t talk about anything special.
You are a man. She is a woman. She is twenty years younger than you. And yet there is no astronomical distance between your universes.
But then you both come from somewhere that has scarred you with love and pain for the rest of your lives.
But then, in your own different ways, you know what it means to come from Iran. To carry with you its contradictions, its wounds, its tenderness, its beauty, and its relentless struggle for freedom.
And then Bahar dances.
She dances tirelessly in front of your camera for hours. Watching her is almost like listening to a fairy tale — one that you don’t quite know how to put into words.

With Bahar in Regent’s Canal.
From the series Here We Are.