Safar sang ( stones journey) was about a quest for transporting a large mill stone across a vast landscape to a village so that those villagers could become free from a wealthy landowner who exploited them. Many of the films that had a socially critical angle appealed to those on the left of the Iranian political spectrum, this film however was more in line with the land reforms that the late Shah had introduced so it didn’t challenge the establishment and if anything supported the changes. Iranian land reform was a double edges sword in the sense that it seemed like a positive move in distributing vast amounts of rural land that were held in the hands of wealthy landowners but at the same time the peasants could not afford the machinery etc. so fell in further debt. I think had the program been implemented properly it would have brought about a great social change within the Iranian society because it would have empowered those peasants and landownership means more say in political issues and more democracy ( as was the case with Constitution of Carolina, and John Locke’s every man gets at least 50 acres policy forming the basis of democracy, “putting aside the pretext that it was used for i.e. slavery!”).
