"Blackboards" features such strong performances. How did you find your cast?

It took a long time as I chose them one by one from different villages, speaking to each one seperately. I did initially consider a professional actor for one of the roles - and in fact hired one - but he was trying too hard to be real, as many of the other actors were non-professionals and so extraordinarily naturalistic that it just wasn't working out, and so I had to ask him to go. It was better with the local people. The location also gave the people a metaphysical energy.

Was the film a difficult one to make, especially in terms of the mountainous region where you shot it?

It was hard, in fact like "The Apple" (Samira Makhmalbaf's debut) it was a miracle of a challenge. The location was very near to the border of Iran and Iraq and there were many land mines left there which could have killed many of us. Then again I felt how could we make a movie about these kind of situations, without experiencing them for ourselves. And yes, climbing those mountains was very hard. The working with non-professional actors was also very hard. But, as the process went on it became easier, especially as it was my second movie-making experience. Another thing that was difficult was that I was the only woman there. The other crew members and the majority of the actors were men but they very quickly believed in me as they realised that I would not ask them to do something that I was not prepared to do myself. They learned to trust me.

What were the origins of the story?

After "The Apple" I was looking for a subject that would give me a lot of energy and whilst I was travelling to Kurdistan with my father (the acclaimed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf) the idea of a teacher with a blackboard looking for students really came to his mind. I thought that it was a very open subject, surreal and at the same time very naturalistic, with so many social and humanistic meanings. So I asked my father to give me the script. But even during the writing and the actual shooting I believe that some kind of life came into the life of the movie we were trying to create.

The film looks closely at the complexity of human relationships.

The important thing for me was to deal with the way we fail each other in our relationships and the way in which we relate to each other. Through the processes of making a movie these things become evident, that's why in "Blackboards" I thought it was important to make the lead character a teacher. I also like to look at the details of human relations, for example the marriage in the film which is funny and yet intensely painful at the same time.

Read more about the challenges Samira faced in Peers and Working in Iran.