Jasmin Tabatabai: “Iran does not release citizenship”

by time news

EOne day in the film “Mitra” the doorbell rings at the door of the respected scientist Haleh in Holland. She doesn’t know the visitors, a man and a woman. But she realizes at first sight that they must come from Iran, like herself.

They bring her a message that she has been waiting for 37 years: Leyla has been found, the best friend of Haleh’s daughter Mitra, who was involved in the resistance against the mullah regime at the time. Mitra, arrested and executed for the betrayal of Leyla.

Haleh fled west and started a new life like her brother after surviving torture in Evin Prison. And now Leyla is said to be in the Netherlands too, and “the organization” – a group of resistance fighters in exile – requires Haleh to identify Leyla. If she does, the traitor will be liquidated. Haleh – that’s the actress Jasmin Tabatabai in “Mitra”, whose parents fled to Germany from the mullahs 41 years ago.

Haleh (Jasmin Tabatabai) and her brother (Mohsen Namjoo)

Those: camino-film.com

It is hard to imagine how much suffering must have accumulated in the four decades since the Khomeini revolution, since the establishment of the Iranian state of God. No, we do not overlook the coup orchestrated by the CIA and MI6 against the democratically elected Iranian government that brought a dictator to power, the Shah.

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We also do not forget US support for Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in misguided revenge for the hostage-taking in the American embassy in Tehran. We know that it is infinitely complicated without including Israel in the equation.

Which hardly a film tells about

The first few years after Khomeini came to power alone, with hundreds of thousands of arrests, executions and exiles, never offered any outgoing material – but there are next to no films about it. Of course, they cannot come from Iran, but there is no such thing as an exiled Iranian film community, even after 40 years.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the first generation in exile first had to build a new life for themselves; perhaps also with the fact that at least 98 percent of Iranians voted for the constitution of a godly state at the time. There may have been a lot of fake votes, but many later exiles have to admit that they were guilty of misjudging the mullahs.

Arrived in the west: Haleh as a congress speaker

Arrived in the west: Haleh as a congress speaker

Those: camino-film.com

A new life in exile. There are promising Iranian actors from the post-revolution generation who may have been born in Iran but were socialized in Germany, such as Narges Rashidi and Arash Marandi, who have made international careers. There are great Iranian directors. Those who remain staunchly in the country, despite all the reprisals, like Jafar Panahi. Those who settled in exile and tell universal stories, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

There are those who try not to fall the fine line between criticism and conformance, like Asghar Farhadi, whose “A Hero” has just been named Iran’s official Oscar nominee. And there are directors like Bahman Ghobadi, who asked the Oscar Academy to create a category for “homeless” films, for films made in exile.

Jasmin Tabatabai was born in Tehran and grew up bilingually at a German-Iranian school there. No “organization” knocks on your door in Berlin to win you over for this or that campaign. She is considered a German-speaking actress.

“Nobody could guarantee that I would be allowed out again”

The Foreign Office asked her if she wanted to travel to Iran on the cultural exchange train: “I always had to refuse because nobody could guarantee that I would be allowed out again. Iran does not release citizenship. Anyone who has an Iranian parent is and will remain Iranian. Why? So that they have access to you. There is an official travel warning from the Federal Foreign Office for dual citizens. Some are arbitrarily arrested because the Iranian state needs money. Then the Foreign Office has to try to buy them out. “

Tabatabai has always tried to stay out of the scuffles and suspicions of the exiled community. When the media asks her as an “expert” on Iran when there is a new Middle East crisis, all she says is that she has not been there for 40 years. She played far more Lisas and Helenas, Erikas and Paulas than Aysches, she even played Kriemhild.

In 2005 – she had long been a “German star” – she played her first “Iranian role” in “Unfamiliar Skin”: a lesbian woman who seeks asylum in Germany and can only get it if she pretends to be a man. Then she became Mina Amiri, the first Iranian-born commissioner on German mainstream television, and she is still proud of that after 120 episodes of “Last Trace Berlin”. Next came “The Manchador”, in which the men should wear a blindfold, which is much more logical if the women are to be protected from the greedy male gaze.

Lone fighters in emigration

And now Haleh, her fourth “Iranian” role in 15 years. Haleh only knows this Leyla by her voice, and she heard it almost four decades ago. Still, she waited so long for this moment, for revenge for her daughter’s death. You have to get certainty.

She lurks in front of “Leyla’s” apartment, she sneaks into their trust and that of their little daughter. The alleged Leyla has a different name, there is no objective evidence, only the suspicion of the “organization”. And there is Haleh’s deep need that it should be Leyla, please – so that she can come to an end with her grief.

This is not a theoretical, not a constructed plot, it is based on a story from the family of the director Kaweh Modiri, nor one of the Iranian lone warriors in emigration. It’s a small film, shot with Dutch and German film funding; there is obviously not a lot of money there, and you can see that most in the mask of Tabatabai, who plays both the young Haleh (mid-thirties) and the old (early seventies) in her early 50s and doesn’t look right after either age.

But you forget that more and more, the more you understand what the film is threatening to lead to: Haleh can only free herself from her trauma by committing a new injustice herself. It is a murderous cycle from which the Iranians – those abroad, the opposition at home and those in power – have so far not even found a way out; of course also because the regime is becoming more and more repressive.

“Mitra” is not a perfect film, but it is unsettling because it is fully aware of how closely blatant injustice and the reflex of revenge are closely related.

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