The day after filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani debuted her documentary about Iranian freedom fighters, Rehearsals for a Revolution, final Saturday afternoon on the Cannes Film Pageant, U.S. President Donald Trump declared “the clock is ticking” on her house nation. The following day, as Ahangarani answered reporters’ questions on a sunny terrace, Trump mentioned he was calling off a looming navy strike, then rapidly rotated and informed White Home reporters that he’d ordered the Pentagon to begin a full-scale navy assault “at a moment’s notice” if talks fell by means of.
Then on Friday, the penultimate day of the Cannes Film Festival, she won the L’Oeil d’Or (or Golden Eye) for the competition’s finest documentary amid a ray of hope: Pakistan’s military chief, Subject Marshal Asim Munir, had simply arrived in Tehran as a part of a delegation geared toward ending the warfare.
“Of course it feels strange to be in a fancy place and to dress up and go on the red carpet when your country is at war,” Ahangarani informed me earlier within the week by means of a translator, “but at the same time it’s not different from all the other moments of our lives. We’re in exile.”
The documentary, which performed out of competitors as a particular screening, takes place throughout 5 chapters, every devoted to an individual Ahangarani loves — her father, an uncle, a trainer, a college buddy — who was both killed, or imprisoned, or compelled to flee Iran within the battle for democracy. She additionally narrates the complete movie, with a strong and poetic script about defective recollections, loss and longing, overlaying shockingly uncooked footage she both discovered or risked her life to shoot herself.
In her introduction on the premiere, Ahanagarani devoted the screening to moms who’d misplaced their kids within the battle for freedom and democracy. “These are difficult days for [the Iranian people], without internet, daily news of executions by the Islamic Republic, and the heavy shadow of war,” she mentioned. “However I really imagine today have handed and the individuals of Iran will have a good time freedom collectively as a result of I imagine of their braveness and their steady battle for freedom.“
The movie “has a very clear message for hope and peace,” producer Kaveh Farman added. “We say no to genocide, no to war, no to executions. We condemn all massacres all over the world… Let cinema be a reminder of our common humanity.”
There had been audible weeping all through the screening, however the viewers’s response was removed from universally constructive. One Iranian man with competition credentials round his neck shouted “Western propaganda!” whereas leaving the theater; he apparently thought the ultimate chapter didn’t adequately tackle protesters’ alleged violence towards the federal government, an opinion he additionally shouted to anybody and everybody.
“I’m sure that the Islamic Republic won’t appreciate this film,” Ahangarani mentioned with a shrug. “They’ve already started attacking it on their [social media] pages.”
Ahangarani is only one of a number of Iranian filmmakers who went to Cannes to premiere their life’s work below the cloud of a U.S.-led warfare — following the Iranian regime’s bloodbath of tens of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters. Nader Saeivar screened The Witness within the experimental ACID sidebar competitors — a thriller about an aged feminine dance teacher battling the systemic coverup of a buddy’s homicide that was impressed by the Ladies Life Freedom motion. Final yr’s Palme d’Or winner, Jafar Panahi, was the co-writer and editor of the film, which filmed in secret in Iran.
And within the foyer of her resort, Ahangarani bumped into Asghar Farhadi, the two-time Oscar-winning director and big of Iranian cinema whose newest movie, the French-language Parallel Tales, is within the competition’s fundamental competitors. Farhadi lives in Tehran however refuses to make one other movie there so long as the federal government restricts his freedom and requires approval over his scripts and shoots.
Ahangarani had run into Farhadi as she was speeding out to her personal crimson carpet. “I was just stressed… and he was cute. He was very nice,” she mentioned. “He took my hand and he said, ‘No worries, it’s going to be fine.’ It’s just comforting to see the level that he has reached, and he’s been through all this and survived.”
Farhadi has routinely been harassed by the regime, each by being topic to bans on journey and filmmaking, in addition to to a plagiarism lawsuit that was later thrown out. Many different filmmakers have grow to be political prisoners, held in captivity in Tehran’s infamous Evin Jail. Panahi based mostly his Oscar-nominated It Was Simply an Accident on three months he spent there in solitary confinement in 2010, subjected to intense interrogations and torture, resulting in a starvation strike to lastly get out. Then, whereas overseas for his Oscar marketing campaign this winter, he was sentenced in absentia to a yr in jail and a two-year ban from filmmaking for “propaganda against the regime.” As his contemporaries had their Cannes moments, information broke that Panahi could be going to trial on Could 20. (His co-writer on the movie, Mehdi Mahmoudian, was re-arrested and held in jail for 17 days through the Oscar marketing campaign for writing an opinion piece condemning the federal government’s violent crackdown on protesters.)
At his Cannes press convention, Farhadi condemned the bloodbath and warfare. And in April, he each referred to as on his fellow administrators to talk out and declared the U.S. assaults on Iran’s infrastructure “a war crime.”
Ahangarani has skilled a lot of this herself. A preferred actor-turned-filmmaker and high-profile critic of the regime, she was first detained and interrogated in 2009 for her help of the Inexperienced Motion, an enormous wave of protests supporting an opposition candidate. Then, in 2011, simply as she was about to depart for the girls’s soccer World Cup in Germany — the place she’d been employed to write down weblog posts and supply TV commentary for the Persian-language arm of German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle — she went lacking. Her family and friends later found that she’d been arrested. She was interrogated for 17 days in Evin Jail and launched solely upon international outcry and the posting of hefty bail — after which she was banned from touring exterior Iran.
This meant lacking the worldwide premieres of her appearing milestones like The Maritime Silk Highway on the 2011 Warsaw Worldwide Movie Pageant or 2013’s Trapped (Darband), which performed at festivals in Vancouver and Chicago. She additionally missed the premieres of a number of quick documentaries she’s made, which might’t be performed in Iran as a result of they’re too crucial of the regime.
Her last arrest got here in 2013, when she was accused of “action against national security” due to her vocal help of Iran’s new reasonable president, Hassan Rouhani, with the judiciary utilizing “evidence” from her 2011 imprisonment to condemn her to a different 18 months in jail. Her lawyer appealed and he or she managed to keep away from extra jail time, however the journey ban was solidified.
Then, in April 2022, she quietly fled Iran, heading to the Busan Brief Movie Pageant to premiere her 15-minute documentary I Am Making an attempt to Bear in mind, which received the Jury Prize and was finally distributed by The New Yorker and is the idea of Rehearsals for a Revolution. At that time, she’d been below journey restrictions and near-constant state surveillance for a decade. The regime had been cracking down on clandestine filmmaking; by July, different high-profile dissident filmmakers like Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof have been imprisoned based mostly on deferred sentences from years earlier.
Whereas in Busan, Ahangarani informed me she realized she confronted the sure enforcement of her 18-month sentence from again in 2013. After which in September 2022, she ardently spoke out on behalf of the Ladies, Life, Freedom Motion, a large wave of protests that broke out after a younger Kurdish girl died within the fingers of Iran’s morality police after being arrested for “improper” use of a hijab. Her activism ensured she couldn’t return house with out going through arrest, persecution or loss of life.
Immediately, she informed me, she discovered herself a migrant with no house. With no alternative however to remain overseas, she finally settled in London in 2023, the place she married Iranian musician Ali Azimi and had their daughter.
Now each she and her dad and mom — who occurred to journey overseas simply earlier than the warfare and the cancellation of all industrial flights — are caught exterior Iran, separated from the remainder of their household. A minimum of it meant that her mom may attend her Cannes premiere.
Whereas making films in Iran continues to be “extremely hard and risky,” Ahangarani’s heartened each time an Iranian director has a premiere at a global movie competition. “I mean, almost all these directors have been to prison,” she mentioned, “they usually come out, and once more they’ve this resilience of going again and take a look at onerous… to go on and make movies — and by no means to lose hope.“
Ahangarani began fantasizing about making a feature-length documentary in regards to the up to date historical past of Iran six years in the past. However being on the run put a wrench in these plans.
“I had to experience migration and not being in my own country, and not having any income,” she mentioned. “A totally different life is quite unstabilizing. It’s not easy to get back to work while you’ve lost everything. Then suddenly, I got married. So my life changed quite dramatically.”
It was solely three years in the past that she sat right down to make Rehearsals for a Revolution in earnest. She’d already selected structuring it as chapters, every one among which took six months to craft along with her editor, Arash Ashtiani.
She was midway by means of enhancing the fifth and last chapter, about her personal migration, when the Islamic regime started to bloodbath demonstrators. Then information broke that the regime had lower off the web, amid loss of life numbers that rose dramatically on daily basis. “You’re completely paralyzed,” she mentioned. “i mean, you’re in the middle of your work and you don’t know what is going on.”
Then warfare broke out. “We were completely confused, completely unable to go on working at the same time,” she mentioned. “How could I neglect the fact that I’m dealing with the contemporary history of Iran and then the most massive tragedy and crisis appears in Iran? How can I close my eyes on it, or not deal with it?”
Her alternative was between stopping work till there was some decision, or making an attempt a unique path. So, she turned the digital camera on herself to speak in regards to the uncertainty she felt placing the movie collectively, biking by means of the alternative ways she might need tried to finish it. They’d solely two or three weeks to get that half prepared earlier than Cannes, which meant she couldn’t be a perfectionist (as she had been with the opposite chapters). In some way, she mentioned, that course of felt becoming for the way she’s experiencing this second.
“When tragedy happens in people’s lives, they don’t do as they usually do,” she informed THR. “They don’t take time to deal with it, they just confront it. And so, finally I decided to give up my idea of what I could have made, and it gave me more confidence to leave this fifth one [chapter] as it was.”
The standing ovation on the premiere was her affirmation that the ending labored. For years, she mentioned, it had simply been her and her editor locked in a small room with a microphone, going by means of the archive, experimenting, making an attempt out varied narrations. “I was like, ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same film?’”
And but, even with all of the accolades there’s nonetheless a chunk of her lacking. Earlier than she left Iran, her buddies usually talked in regards to the significance of not being bitter whereas overseas and simply having fun with her life.
“But now that I’ve experienced it myself,” she mentioned, “I say that, even in the most joyful moments of your life [in exile], you still feel this bitterness and this longing and this sadness. But that’s how it is. That’s the choice we’ve made.”
