The Berlinale shines its spotlight on the fight for the freedom of citizens in Iran with a demonstration of support on its red carpet this Saturday, February 18 and the screening of numerous films by dissident filmmakers.
Some six months after the beginning of the protests against the regime in Tehran, the Berlin festival wants “give a voice to the people in Iran” during this 73rd edition, underlines to AFP the co-director Mariette Rissenbeek.
With the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” (women, life, freedom, nldr) written in huge green and blue letters on the screen of the Berlinale, around fifty Iranian filmmakers, screenwriters, actors in exile held up signs calling for the release of imprisoned protesters. Some, like actresses Golshifteh Farahani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who live in France, had tears in their eyes.
“In a dictatorship like Iran, art (…) is something essential, it’s like oxygen”said Golshifteh Farahani last week, seen in Hollywood in particular in the film Paterson. This year she is a member of the Jury of the Berlinale.
“Patriarchal system”
“We hope that hand in hand we can change something through cinema”told AFP Zar Amir Ebrahimi, prize for female interpretation in 2022 at Cannes for Nights of Mashhad.
The actress plays a central role in two documentaries presented at the Berlinale on Iranian dissent.
In Seven winters in Tehran by the German Steffi Niederzoll, she lends her voice to Reyhaney Jabarri, who has become a symbol of the fight for women’s rights in Iran. Sentenced to death for the murder of a man who she said had sexually assaulted her when she was 19, she was executed by hanging in 2014. Based on clandestinely filmed images, telephone recordings, letters and the diary she kept in prison from 2007 to 2014, the film tells of her family’s futile fight to save her.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who left his country after the broadcast of an intimate video causing humiliation and scandal, is a “victim of this Iranian patriarchal system, like Reyhaney Jabarri”, judges the German director, in an interview with AFP. “I did not collaborate with this system, exactly like Reyhaney”, says Zar Amir Ebrahimi.
The actress also shares her own story in the documentary my worst enemy by Iranian director Mehran Tamadon, who also lives in exile in France. The film places her in the role of the oppressor since she embodies an agent of the regime interrogating the filmmaker. She orders him to undress, then takes him out into the street in his underpants after showering him.
Filmed naked
Mehran Tamadon, like the actress, have in real life experienced these episodes of humiliation inflicted by the Iranian authorities. Zar Amir Ebrahimi says she had to undress in front of a woman under the pretext of a medical examination and then was filmed naked. “The interrogation I underwent in Iran was less harsh than the one with Zar but for the film, I knew that in the end I was going to go home. In Iran, they had my passport and I did not know how many time I was going to stay”, Mr. Tamadon told AFP.
Among the other works by Iranian filmmakers shown in Berlin, the animated film Mermaid, directed by Sepideh Farsi. It tells the story of Omid, a 14-year-old boy who stayed with his grandfather in Abadan, the capital of Iran’s oil industry, besieged by the Iraqi army in 1980 at the start of the Iran-Iraq war. “It was a turning point in the history of Iran, as we are currently experiencing a turning point with the current revolution”said Sepideh Farsi at a press conference in Berlin.
In the past, the Berlinale has awarded its highest honour, the Golden Bear, to many big names in Iranian cinema, including Asghar Farhadi (A separation), Jafar Panahi (Taxi) and Muhammad Rasoulof (There Is No Evil).