She Won Cannes’ Best Documentary Award While Her Country Was at War
The day after filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani debuted her documentary about Iranian freedom fighters, Rehearsals for a Revolution, last Saturday afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival, U.S. President Donald Trump declared “the clock is ticking” on her home country. The next day, as Ahangarani answered reporters’ questions on a sunny terrace, Trump said he was calling off a looming military strike, then quickly turned around and told White House reporters that he’d ordered the Pentagon to start a full-scale military assault “at a moment’s notice” if talks fell through.
Then on Friday, the penultimate day of the Cannes Film Festival, she won the L’Oeil d’Or (or Golden Eye) for the festival’s best documentary amid a ray of hope: Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, had just arrived in Tehran as part of a delegation aimed at ending the war.
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“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 told me earlier in the week through 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 played out of competition as a special screening, takes place across five chapters, each dedicated to a person Ahangarani loves — her father, an uncle, a teacher, a university friend — who was either killed, or imprisoned, or forced to flee Iran in the fight for democracy. She also narrates the entire film, with a powerful and poetic script about faulty memories, loss and longing, overlaying shockingly raw footage she either found or risked her life to shoot herself.
In her introduction at the premiere, Ahanagarani dedicated the screening to mothers who’d lost their children in the fight 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 said. “But I truly believe these days have passed and the people of Iran will celebrate freedom together because I believe in their courage and their continuous fight for freedom.“
The film “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 throughout the screening, but the audience’s reaction was far from universally positive. One Iranian man with festival credentials around his neck shouted “Western propaganda!” while leaving the theater; he apparently thought the final chapter didn’t adequately address protesters’ alleged violence against the government, an opinion he also shouted to anyone and everyone.
“I’m sure that the Islamic Republic won’t appreciate this film,” Ahangarani said with a shrug. “They’ve already started attacking it on their [social media] pages.”
Ahangarani is just one of several Iranian filmmakers who went to Cannes to premiere their life’s work under the cloud of a U.S.-led war — following the Iranian regime’s massacre of tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Nader Saeivar screened The Witness in the experimental ACID sidebar competition — a thriller about an elderly female dance instructor battling the systemic coverup of a friend’s murder that was inspired by the Women Life Freedom movement. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Jafar Panahi, was the co-writer and editor of the movie, which filmed in secret in Iran.
And in the lobby of her hotel, Ahangarani ran into Asghar Farhadi, the two-time Oscar-winning director and giant of Iranian cinema whose latest film, the French-language Parallel Tales, is in the festival’s main competition. Farhadi lives in Tehran but refuses to make another film there as long as the government restricts his freedom and requires approval over his scripts and shoots.
Ahangarani had run into Farhadi as she was rushing out to her own red carpet. “I was just stressed… and he was cute. He was very nice,” she said. “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, both by being subject to bans on travel and filmmaking, as well as to a plagiarism lawsuit that was later thrown out. Many other filmmakers have become political prisoners, held in captivity in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Panahi based his Oscar-nominated It Was Just an Accident on three months he spent there in solitary confinement in 2010, subjected to intense interrogations and torture, leading to a hunger strike to finally get out. Then, while abroad for his Oscar campaign this winter, he was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison and a two-year ban from filmmaking for “propaganda against the regime.” As his contemporaries had their Cannes moments, news broke that Panahi would be going to trial on May 20. (His co-writer on the film, Mehdi Mahmoudian, was re-arrested and held in prison for 17 days during the Oscar campaign for writing an opinion piece condemning the government’s violent crackdown on protesters.)
At his Cannes press conference, Farhadi condemned the massacre and war. And in April, he both called on his fellow directors to speak out and declared the U.S. attacks on Iran’s infrastructure “a war crime.”
Ahangarani has experienced much of this herself. A popular actor-turned-filmmaker and high-profile critic of the regime, she was first detained and interrogated in 2009 for her support of the Green Movement, a huge wave of protests supporting an opposition candidate. Then, in 2011, just as she was about to leave for the women’s soccer World Cup in Germany — where she’d been hired to write blog posts and provide TV commentary for the Persian-language arm of German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle — she went missing. Her friends and family later discovered that she’d been arrested. She was interrogated for 17 days in Evin Prison and released only upon international outcry and the posting of hefty bail — after which she was banned from traveling outside Iran.
This meant missing the international premieres of her acting milestones like The Maritime Silk Road at the 2011 Warsaw International Film Festival or 2013’s Trapped (Darband), which played at festivals in Vancouver and Chicago. She also missed the premieres of several short documentaries she’s made, which can’t be played in Iran because they’re too critical of the regime.
Her final arrest came in 2013, when she was accused of “action against national security” because of her vocal support of Iran’s new moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, with the judiciary using “evidence” from her 2011 imprisonment to sentence her to another 18 months in prison. Her lawyer appealed and she managed to avoid more jail time, but the travel ban was solidified.
Then, in April 2022, she quietly fled Iran, heading to the Busan Short Film Festival to premiere her 15-minute documentary I Am Trying to Remember, which won the Jury Prize and was eventually distributed by The New Yorker and is the basis of Rehearsals for a Revolution. At that point, she’d been under travel restrictions and near-constant state surveillance for a decade. The regime had been cracking down on clandestine filmmaking; by July, other high-profile dissident filmmakers like Panahi and Mohammed Rasoulof were imprisoned based on deferred sentences from years earlier.
While in Busan, Ahangarani told me she realized she faced the certain enforcement of her 18-month sentence from back in 2013. And then in September 2022, she ardently spoke out on behalf of the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, a massive wave of protests that broke out after a young Kurdish woman died in the hands of Iran’s morality police after being arrested for “improper” use of a hijab. Her activism ensured she couldn’t return home without facing arrest, persecution or death.
Suddenly, she told me, she found herself a migrant without a home. With no choice but to stay abroad, she eventually settled in London in 2023, where she married Iranian musician Ali Azimi and had their daughter.
Now both she and her parents — who happened to travel abroad just before the war and the cancellation of all commercial flights — are stuck outside Iran, separated from the rest of their family. At least it meant that her mother could attend her Cannes premiere.
While making movies in Iran is still “extremely hard and risky,” Ahangarani’s heartened every time an Iranian director has a premiere at an international film festival. “I mean, almost all these directors have been to prison,” she said, “and they come out, and again they have this resilience of going back and try hard… to go on and make films — and never to lose hope.“
Ahangarani started fantasizing about making a feature-length documentary about the contemporary history of Iran six years ago. But being on the run put a wrench in those plans.
“I had to experience migration and not being in my own country, and not having any income,” she said. “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 only three years ago that she sat down to make Rehearsals for a Revolution in earnest. She’d already decided on structuring it as chapters, each one of which took six months to craft with her editor, Arash Ashtiani.
She was halfway through editing the fifth and final chapter, about her own migration, when the Islamic regime began to massacre demonstrators. Then news broke that the regime had cut off the internet, amid death numbers that rose dramatically every day. “You’re completely paralyzed,” she said. “i mean, you’re in the middle of your work and you don’t know what is going on.”
Then war broke out. “We were completely confused, completely unable to go on working at the same time,” she said. “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 choice was between stopping work until there was some resolution, or trying a different path. So, she turned the camera on herself to talk about the uncertainty she felt putting the film together, cycling through the different ways she might have tried to end it. They had only two or three weeks to get that part ready before Cannes, which meant she couldn’t be a perfectionist (as she had been with the other chapters). Somehow, she said, that process felt fitting for how she’s experiencing this moment.
“When tragedy happens in people’s lives, they don’t do as they usually do,” she told 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 at the premiere was her confirmation that the ending worked. For years, she said, it had just been her and her editor locked in a small room with a microphone, going through the archive, experimenting, trying out various narrations. “I was like, ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same film?’”
And yet, even with all the accolades there’s still a piece of her missing. Before she left Iran, her friends often talked about the importance of not being bitter while abroad and just enjoying her life.
“But now that I’ve experienced it myself,” she said, “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.”
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