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Iranian director Mahnaz Mohammadi dramatised many of the brutal moments from her own repeated imprisonment by the repressive regime in her latest film, including physical and psychological torture, but there was one element she thought would be too confronting for audiences.
“They took me three times for hanging,” she said from Berlin.
While that disturbing tactic was intended to force a confession to crimes against the regime, Mohammadi has continued to courageously make films since she was freed. She has now shot Roya, a drama about a teacher of that name who has been jailed in Tehran, in secret without official permission.
Mohammadi’s life has been difficult since being sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of “endangering national security” and “propaganda against the regime” in 2011.
Mohammadi spent months in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison until the sentence was overturned in another court. Since then, she has been subject to arrests, surveillance and severe restrictions on her freedom.
Mohammadi joins fellow Iranian directors Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig) and Jafar Panahi (It Was Just An Accident) in making films that courageously criticise the lack of freedom under the regime despite being jailed.
Roya shows what she is up against – the drama, screening at the Persian Film Festival in Sydney this week then touring to Melbourne in mid-June, centres on a teacher (Turkish actress Melisa Sözen), who has been arrested for supporting women’s rights.
She is subjected to harrowing treatment – initially shown through her eyes – intended to force her to confess on camera to fabricated crimes. If she doesn’t, she faces indefinite solitary confinement in a small concrete cell.
Speaking on Zoom from Germany, where Roya is getting a cinema release after premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, Mohammadi said she had been jailed “at least five or six times” but tried not to remember how often.
While the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has called her as an activist, Mohammadi rejected that term. “I was not [an] activist,” she said. “I was a person just thinking ‘this is wrong’.”
That feisty person is best known for the 2008 documentary Travelogue, about passengers on a train leaving Iran for Turkey, and the 2019 feature film Son-Mother, about a struggling widow facing the loss of her 10-year-old son if she accepts a marriage proposal.
“Shortly after the screening of Son-Mother at the Toronto International Film Festival and my return to Iran, a new round of interrogations began and a new case was opened against me,” Mohammadi said. “Since then, my life has once again become semi-hidden and I have had to significantly limit my communications.”
She did not want to reveal how she left Iran for Berlin but plans to go back as soon as possible, despite the war the US and Israel are waging on the country and the risk of being arrested again.
“This path, like that of many independent Iranian artists, has been marked by difficulty and uncertainty,” she said.
Mohammadi wants to get back to her family in Tehran.
“What has been most difficult in recent weeks is the sense of disconnection,” she said. “Since the [Persian] New Year, contact with family and friends has been extremely limited, and this creates a constant background of worry.”
Iran was also “where my language, my memories and my work are rooted”.
Asked how she viewed the war, Mohammadi sighed, then said it was like Roya losing track of how many days she had been in prison and wishing for it to end. She felt for people in Iran who had been living through a near-total internet shutdown for almost a month.
“In the whole world, [it has become] bipolar: war/ anti-war,” she said. “If I take this side or that side as an Iranian, for me it doesn’t matter. Both [are] horrible.
“[With the war] they can have a little bit of hope that maybe they can find freedom. [But without the war] how can you survive such a brutal regime?”
Mohammadi thought the US had succeeded in regime change to some extent, citing the deaths of the head of a court that sentenced her and one of her prison interrogators.
“I never thought in my life, I could get rid of these people,” she said. “When they are [dead], I feel I can a little bit breathe.”
How did she feel hearing US President Trump’s threat to Iran that “a whole civilisation will die” last week?
“I know the businessman just wants to make a deal,” Mohammadi said. “This is just a deal war … Everybody knows that so many wars have happened in Iran. Nothing can ever destroy it.”
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