Film: "If Hafez Wrote a Haiku for Cowboys" (2024)

• Event Date: Saturday, October 17, 2026
• Time: 1:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Age: All ages
• Cost: Free

• Film

If Hafez Wrote a Haiku for Cowboys
Directed by Masahiro Sugano (2024, 115 min) with special guest, Anida Yeou Ali (U.S. Producer)

Global Arts Performance Initiatives and Salaam MENA Cultural Center present a screening of If Hafez Wrote a Haiku for Cowboys, connecting everyday lives across eight cities in Iran, Japan and the United States. Filmmaker Masahiro Sugano will join us for a short, online discussion following the film, with U.S. producer Anida Yoeu Ali joining in person.

A reception with Anida Yoeu Ali will follow the program at the Salaam MENA Cultural Center (700 S. Gregory St. Suite E, Urbana).

About The Film:

Filmed in a cinéma vérité style across 8 cities in Iran, Japan and the U.S. and edited with the pulse of a haiku poet, this feature depicts 18 fictional mundane scenarios on regret, longing and love that play across a split-screen tapestry. The slice-of-life plots incorporate a Japanese father who awkwardly reconnects with his estranged daughter, a young Iranian woman who desperately desires a red car to impress her blind date, and a black American cowboy who searches the city on a bicycle. More personalities emerge from a yellow dress, black chadors, and fake Indigenous regalia set against a visual panorama of red shrines in Kyoto, blue muqarnas of Tehran mosques and orange boulders of Colorado. Characters walk, drive, juggle, laugh, mourn, eat, love and regret amidst distinct landscapes of busy subways, arid deserts, quiet cemeteries, and lively festivals. Each story starts in one city and ends in another never fully resolved as everyone struggles on a search for something or someone. Sometimes people speak at the same time overlapping in multiple languages as settings jump between countries—all work to depict a commonly shared ordinariness often forgotten in a divisive world.

About the Filmmaker:

Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, Masahiro Sugano moved to the U.S. to pursue filmmaking. His thesis short film "Hisao" was nominated for a Student Academy Award and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. Sugano’s first feature film "Second Moon" (2006) premiered at Busan International Film Festival 2006. His second feature film "Cambodian Son" (2014), a documentary about a deported poet, screened across the globe and won numerous awards including the Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Cultural Resistance Film Fest of Lebanon 2014, the 2015 Golden Hanoman Prize at the Jogja Asian Film Festival, and the 2016 Best Documentary Award given by the National Asian American Journalists Association. Sugano currently teaches courses in Filmmaking, Global Studies and Media Communications at the University of Washington as a Senior Artist-in-Residence.