by 
AFP
The Berlin Film Festival, long a champion of Iran’s embattled independent directors, spotlights its citizens’ fight for fundamental rights with a series of screenings, events and a red carpet protest.
French-Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani, who sits on the grand awards jury with President Kristen Stewart, said at the start of the festival on Thursday that cinema is a crucial fuel for the freedom movement.
“In a country like Iran, which is a dictatorship, art is not just an intellectual or philosophical thing, it’s essential, it’s like oxygen,” she said.
Farahani made a name for himself in Iranian films 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 director Mariette Rissenbeek, who told AFP the Berlinale is standing with Iranian directors who “were not allowed to travel to the festival”.
The Berlinale, Europe’s first major cinema show of the year, has awarded its Golden Bears to many of the leading figures in Iranian cinema, including Asghar Farhadi (“A Separation”), Jafar Panahi (“Taxi”) and Mohammad Rasoulof (” There Is No Evil “)).
Iran, rocked by months of anti-government demonstrations, this month released Panahi and Rasoulof from prison along with several dozen other well-known inmates in an apparent placation of critics.
This year the festival is showing several documentaries, including Steffi Niederzoll’s Seven Winters in Tehran and Mehran Tamadon’s My Worst Enemy, which expose the brutal conditions in Iran’s prisons and rampant executions.
Niederzoll’s harrowing film, which includes footage 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 who she alleges tried to rape her.
Featuring harrowing interviews with her family as they fought for their freedom and pleaded for mercy from the murdered man’s son, the film chronicles how an international campaign for Jabbari’s life was born.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes last year, narrates the film using letters, diaries and text messages that Jabbari wrote from prison, where she became a role model for many fellow inmates.
“We hope that together with cinema we can make a difference,” Amir Ebrahimi told AFP.
“My Worst Enemy” also explores state interrogations, as director Tamadon invites members of Paris’s large Iranian exile community to interrogate him using printing techniques they themselves experienced in detention.
Half exposure, half group therapy session, the film asks if anyone, given the chance, can become an instrument of state oppression.
Amir Ebrahimi appears as one of the interrogators and reveals that she was sexually abused by a doctor in custody during an alleged medical examination.
“I couldn’t walk for three days,” she says.
Tamadon told AFP it was “time to forget that the Islamic Republic is going to reform”.
He hailed the role of Western platforms like the Berlinale in “shedding a light on the violence perpetrated against the Iranian people.”
“Iranians in Iran are exhausted – that gives energy and motivation to keep taking to the streets.”
Milad Alami’s drama Opponent stars A Separation’s Payman Maadi as a withdrawn gay man who seeks asylum in northern Sweden with his wife and two daughters.
Alami, who himself moved to Sweden from Iran as a child, said he wanted his second feature film to explore how official repression seeps into even the most intimate relationships, including marriage.
“There are walls between them (the couple) that created this feeling of not being able to talk to each other,” he said in the notes for the film.
The wife Maryam senses her husband’s inner turmoil, even if he keeps her under wraps for fear of reprisals. “This is a big deal in Iran,” Alami said.
For those who left Iran, the struggle to find out who they really are begins anew, he said.
“When you come to another country when there is freedom, how difficult is it to endure?”
AFP
AFP
