Directed By Mobarez Javanmard
Documentary Film | 2009 | Iran
Synopsis
Poetry with the Taste of Ice Cream is a documentary film produced in Iran in 2009, set in the city of Sedeh. The film follows a filmmaker as he moves through public and private spaces markets, religious sites, peripheral neighborhoods, and everyday social environments observing how poetry operates within daily life.
In Sedeh, poetry is not confined to books or literary circles. It appears in casual conversations, political speeches, religious rhetoric, and even in the language of law enforcement. City officials, politicians, police officers, and ordinary citizens regardless of education or social position speak in verse. Poetry becomes a shared language, but also a functional one.
The film opens with a seemingly ordinary poet reading a love poem to a group of sheep, goats, dogs, and shepherds in an open field. This poet, an old friend of the filmmaker, gradually becomes the central figure of the documentary, anchoring the film’s human and emotional axis.
As the filmmaker progresses through the city, more than forty poets appear on screen, alongside non-poets whose speech naturally turns poetic. An earlier surreal work by the filmmaker, If Eyes Could Speak, re-enters the film not as fiction, but through the real presence of one of its poets.
Over time, the filmmaking process itself becomes visible and contested. Authorities intervene. Warnings are issued. Surveillance cameras loom overhead. The camera records not only poetry, but the mechanisms that frame, guide, and control its public expression.
The documentary concludes with a fragmented chorus of poems ghazals and verses spoken by the poets featured accompanied by dispersed images of the city. The film ends without closure, leaving behind a landscape saturated with words and watched from above.
Director’s Statement
This film is not an attempt to celebrate poetry.
It is an attempt to observe where poetry functions.
In Poetry with the Taste of Ice Cream, poetry is neither sacred nor innocent. It circulates freely—spoken by poets, politicians, police officers, and ordinary people alike. The film examines how poetic language can act simultaneously as intimacy, performance, and instrument.
The documentary deliberately allows interruptions, warnings, and visible pressures to enter the frame. The act of filmmaking itself becomes part of the field of control. There is no effort to hide friction or resolve it into narrative comfort.
This film does not ask whether poetry is beautiful.
It asks what poetry does when everyone speaks it and who benefits from that circulation.
Watch Online – Voice of America (VoA) Archive:
Platform 1: https://ir.voanews.com/a/4136522.html
BBC Prsian official Website:
Platform 2:
https://www.bbc.com/persian/tv-and-radio-37590520
Platform 3: https://www.bbc.com/persian/tv-and-radio-37590514
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