It felt like Martyr Aviny had walked the paths of heaven: Ayatollah Khamenei

April 9th marks the martyrdom anniversary of the Iranian war zone filmmaker and artist Morteza Aviny. On this occasion khamenei.ir publishes parts of Ayatollah Khamenei's speech about the importance of arts and the great personality of Martyr Aviny who was killed while he was making a documentary in the mine fields abandoned after Saddam's US-backed war on Iran:

Arts should be used to encourage the youth's resistance
Today across the globe, culture and art are mostly abused against lofty human values, humane beliefs and divine religions. With such conditions the people active in realms of culture and art, in our country, should employ fresh young individuals in the fields of art and spiritually; they should financially support them and encourage their resistance, independence, knowledge and truthful speech through the language of art.

Aviny's "The Narrative of Victory”  was artistic and powerful

We would like to prevent the feeling and the spirit that existed during the imposed war from being forgotten. You should find out what would be appropriate for each time and make preparations. If you can continue making documentaries, in my opinion, it would be good and important work. Of course, in making documentaries, the vocal narrations of the late martyr Aviny were very important. Both the text and the way the text was narrated, were extremely paramount. Had it not been for his artistic narrations, many of the scenes in the documentary would not make any sense.

For a long while "The Narrative of Victory” documentary was broadcasted: I did not know martyr Aviny, but I always was a fan of "The Narrative of Victory”. I mean, I would certainly watch the program every Friday night when it was on TV. It greatly moved me and I could see how influential the narration was.

One who wants to make such documentaries should have that nobility, purity, strength and assuredness of speech. Sometimes one makes a great point, but you can tell he doesn’t believe in it himself. But martyr Aviny's voice, over the documentary, was the voice that uttered those great points and he believed in them. For instance when he said "These youth of ours are more familiar with paths in heaven than paths on the earth.” He would say it in such a way as if he had walked the paths of heaven, seen them and thus knows that these young men are more familiar with them! We assume that the voice over a war documentary should be a hoarse and scratchy voice, but martyr Aviny did not have such a voice. He had a pure and noble voice, which was at the same time very strong. It was in the form of a powerful and artistic message.