The Berlin film festival, long a champion of Iran’s embattled independent directors, is spotlighting its citizens’ fight for basic rights with a series of screenings, events and a red-carpet protest.
French-Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani, who is serving on the jury for the top prizes with president Kristen Stewart, said as the festival kicked off Thursday that cinema was a crucial fuel for the freedom movement.
“In a country like Iran that is a dictatorship, art is not only an intellectual or philosophical thing, it’s essential, it’s like oxygen,” she said.
Farahani made her name in Iranian movies and became an international star in productions such as Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” opposite Adam Driver.
She and Stewart joined the red-carpet demonstration for women’s rights in Iran on Saturday with festival chief Mariette Rissenbeek, who told AFP the Berlinale stood with Iranian directors who “weren’t allowed to travel to the festival”.
– ‘Change something with cinema’ –
The Berlinale, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year, has awarded its Golden Bear top prize to many of the leading lights of Iranian cinema including Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”), Jafar Panahi (“Taxi”) and Mohammad Rasoulof (“There Is No Evil”).
Iran, rocked by months of anti-government rallies, this month released Panahi and Rasoulof from prison along with several dozen other well-known detainees in an apparent attempt to appease critics.
This year, the festival is showing several documentaries, including Steffi Niederzoll’s “Seven Winters in Tehran” and “My Worst Enemy” by Mehran Tamadon, which expose the brutal conditions in Iran’s jails as well as rampant executions.
Niederzoll’s harrowing film, which includes material smuggled out of Iran, tells the story of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was hanged in 2014 at the age of 26 for killing a former intelligence officer she maintained had tried to rape her.
Featuring wrenching interviews with her family, who agitated for her freedom and appealed for mercy to the murdered man’s son, the film recounts how an international campaign for Jabbari’s life arose.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the best actress award at Cannes last year, narrates the film with letters, journals and text messages Jabbari wrote from jail, where she became a role model for many fellow prisoners.
“We hope that, hand in hand, we can change something with cinema,” Amir Ebrahimi told AFP.
“My Worst Enemy” also examines state interrogations, as director Tamadon invites members of Paris’s large Iranian exile community to question him using pressure techniques they themselves experienced in custody.
Half expose, half group therapy session, the film asks whether anyone can become an instrument of state oppression, given the chance.
Amir Ebrahimi appears as one of the interrogators and reveals that she was sexually assaulted while in custody by a female doctor during a purported medical exam.
“I couldn’t walk for three days,”…
