If Hafiz Wrote Haiku For Cowboys

Composed entirely as a split-screen cinematic work, "If Hafez Wrote a Haiku for Cowboys" reimagines the road movie, unfolding across eight strikingly different locations worldwide. Shot in cinéma vérité fashion, this audiovisual haiku immerses us in twenty fictional vignettes of longing, regret, serendipitous encounters, and love.

Among the interwoven stories: a Japanese father fumbling toward reconciliation with the daughter he's grown apart from, a young Iranian woman on a determined hunt for a red car to dazzle her blind date, and an African-American emcee pedaling a borrowed bicycle through the urban frontier in search of a cowboy hat. Bursts of color — a yellow dress, a black chador, ocean-blue imitation Native regalia — play out against Kyoto's crimson shrines, the azure muqarnas of Tehran, and Colorado's amber autumn boulders.

We accompany strangers as they walk, drive, and roll toward destinations whose significance lies precisely in their everyday familiarity. The film's true subject is not arrival but movement — the effort of pushing past obstacles, and the companions and passersby met along the way. Its characters juggle, grieve, laugh, eat, fall in love, and carry regrets through crowded subway cars, parched deserts, hushed cemeteries, and curious spectacles. Every storyline opens in one city and closes in another, each figure chasing something — or someone. Languages and geographies occasionally blur together, unsettling the viewer and weaving the narratives into a single symphony. In this, the film embodies the essence of haiku: the seized moment, nature as motif, juxtaposition, and showing over telling.