Proof if it were needed of the growing panic that has gripped the summit of Iranian power in the face of the proliferation of strikes and protest parades for several months, the internationally renowned filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, golden bear in Berlin in 2020 for his film on the death penalty the devil does not exist, and his colleague Mostafa al-Ahmad have been arrested and are being held at an unknown location. The press release from the Fars agency, a body notoriously close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, explains that the two men are engaged in a counter-revolutionary fight.
They are accused of having posted a call with the hashtag #putyourgundown, also signed by nearly 70 members of the Iranian film community according to the Associated Press, asking the Iranian security forces to no longer threaten civilians with their weapons. , as part of the angry demonstrations that have multiplied in the country since the fatal collapse of the Metropol tower in Abadan in the south-west of the country. The building belonged to a certain Hossein Abdolbagh, close to the first circles of the regime, who had obtained privileges for not respecting, like many others in the country, the security rules. The call denounced “corruption, theft, inefficiency and repression” as a logical consequence of blind governance.
Domestic Dissidents
Also in May, Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi, another internationally renowned filmmaker, sentenced in 2010 to six years in prison and banned from making films or leaving the country for twenty years “for participation in rallies and for propaganda against the regime” united their voices as domestic dissidents to protest against the arrest of two documentary filmmakers, Mina Keshavarz and Firouzeh Khosrovani, who were finally released after paying bail. Each time, these are figures perceived by the regime as having an influence through their ability to record and echo a deep uproar within a bloodless country.
“The arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa al-Ahmad is just one more example of how corrupt national and municipal authorities are turning what is a simple act of protest into a charge of endangering the public order. […] We call on the Iranian authorities to release these two artists without delay.” European Film Academy President Mike Downey, also co-founder of the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), said in a statement.
“I sometimes think about stopping everything”
Unlike his compatriot Asghar Farhadi (A separation, A hero…), who was on the jury of the Cannes festival this year and who remains prudently aloof from any political commitment, Mohammad Rasoulof has constantly expressed himself and has regularly paid the price, while gaining a critical and media surface of more and more important over the years and films – Manuscripts don’t burn, Fipresci prize at Cannes in 2013, A man of integrity, Un certain regard prize at Cannes in 2017, then The devil does not exist. Met by Release in May 2020 at his home in Tehran, in this country which he has not been able to leave since 2017 – the authorities having confiscated his passport on his return from the presentation in Europe and the United States ofA man of integrity – he explained gravely: “It’s very difficult to stay calm. I have very hard moments of loneliness, I sometimes think of stopping everything. I have lived with this for ten years. I had to pay dearly to be myself. It’s like having cancer, I can live and enjoy, but there’s this thing that I didn’t choose that hovers above.”
In 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran”. he appeals, postponing the moment of joining a cell that the regime has finally decided to close on him because of his freedom of action, thought and speech. A relative certifies to us, however, that he had the filmmaker on the phone three weeks ago, expressing no concern when he knew he was summoned by the police for an interrogation. He was also known for hiding his fears behind a facade of bravado and laughing optimism.
Sign of the ambient feverishness, the ongoing repression affects various personalities since the Mehr agency announced that the day of the arrest of the filmmakers, Mostafa Tajzadeh, figure of the reform movement and former contender for the presidential candidacy in 2021, was him also locked in the pattern “activities against state security” by the broadcast of “lies to disturb public opinion”.