What should revolutionaries think and do when they see their good revolutions go bad? That’s the question at the centre of Between Revolutions, in which two young women – one Iranian, the other Romanian – engage in a decade-long exchange of letters documenting the despair and dangers of watching seemingly progressive social movements mutate into something as nightmarish as the regimes they set out to topple.
The latest offering from filmmaker Vlad Petri, now making only his second feature in a career spanning the last 15 years, Between Revolutions draws solely on archive images filmed in Iran and Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Over this exciting and eclectic mix of newsreel footage and official propaganda material, the letters between the two protagonists are heard through voiceovers, with their correspondence punctuated by poetry from literary icons Nina Cassian and Forugh Farrokhzad. In fact, a quote from the former graces the beginning of the film: “You need imagination in order for a future to happen.”
Between Revolutions, indeed, is about past revolutionaries lamenting their spurned futures. With what’s happening in Iran today, however, Petri’s film remains powerfully relevant. Its visual pièce de resistance, the sequence of Iranian women protesting against the onset of a conservative theocracy in the face of an officially-backed horde of heckling men, could very well have been something plucked out of the here and now, though it’s actually from four decades ago. In sync with the socio-cultural zeitgeist of the day, the film was greeted with overt enthusiasm at its premiere in Berlin, where it unspooled as part of the Forum program.
The film should also travel well, given the interest among festival programmers for found-footage cinema, a sub-genre of documentaries which has now established itself on the circuit thanks to the efforts of none other than Petri’s compatriot Radu Jude. In fact, Petri’s approach to Between Revolutions mirrors that of Jude’s in more ways than one. Just like in the latter’s Uppercase Print, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2020, Petri has dug deep into the unsealed Communist-era secret police files for material on which to construct a narrative. He teamed up with a renowned contemporary Romanian writer, Lavinia Braniste, who penned the fictional yet incredibly moving letters between the two protagonists.
But what worked for Jude’s found-footage cinema, and for this type of film in general, is how montage-makers generate new meanings out of the fount of existent source material at their disposal. While Petri definitely deserves heaps of credit for unearthing and bringing such captivating images vividly back to life, he doesn’t exactly probe the material enough to make them work beyond the emotions they yield.
The director has also trodden lightly on the Romanian side of the story, with reflections about the patriarchal nature of Romanian society not as visible and palpable as that for Iran. This is ironic, given how Petri himself said the source of his research on this part was his mother, who studied medicine in 1970s Romania, just like the characters in the film. Then there’s scant background on the presence of Iranian students in the Communist era in the first place, or how their experiences in Romania might have shaped their own perspectives upon their return to their tumultuous home country.
After a prologue in which the viewer is treated to footage of women of all nationalities laughing, singing and sunbathing in Communist Romania, Between Revolutions begins with the two protagonists no longer being together. It’s 1978, and Zahra (voiced in Farsi by Ilinca Harnut) has already quit her medical studies in Romania and gone back home to join her left-wing activist father in a popular movement aimed at overthrowing the U.S.-backed Shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. In her letters, she regales her classmate Maria (Victoria Stoiciu) with tales of her social activism in a “time for change” and the optimism on Tehran’s streets; on screen, the boulevards and buildings are indeed packed with people calling for the downfall of the U.S.-backed tyrant and an end to exploitation.
Maria in turn tells Zahra about being posted to a clinic in the rural hinterlands – a decision resulting perhaps from the structural sexism ingrained in a society which, according to official propaganda, championed sexual equality and celebrates women’s ability to “think, suffer and hope” for the country. All is then not well: Maria also tells Zahra how she fears for her own safety and sanity on streets filled with leery men. Zahra’s problems are more acute, as she laments the way progressive intellectuals are marginalised and persecuted by the new theocratic state machine in the newly-established Islamic Republic of Iran.
Her circumstances worsen in subsequent letters as Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors harden their grip on the political and personal spheres in Iran – a pain Maria would eventually get to feel herself, as she witnesses how the ousting of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 resolved only parts of the problems in Romanian society and actually generated quite a few more. Beneath triumphal images of joyous protesters flying Romanian flags with the Communist insignia cut out, Maria says that “victory can be confiscated” easily. What she means is perhaps spelt out immediately after, with images of people and trucks advertising U.S. cigarettes and soft drinks running amok on Bucharest’s streets.
So it is that the viewers are treated to revolutions going astray. But there is a danger. By not fully contextualising the past from which these social changes emerged — the way the Shah ran Iran as a right-wing police-state, or Ceausescu’s own “cultural revolution” against the intelligentsia and political dissent in Romania in the 1970s — Between Revolutions risks being seen as harking back to a happy, egalitarian past (as suggested in the archive footage of independent, fashionably dressed women in the streets of Tehran before 1979, and similarly happy women in Romanian before 1989) that never really existed. While the film does pack an emotional punch as a memento of human relationships and pains of the past – especially in the romance that dares not speak its name between the two characters – its structure and grasp of the complex irony of history is somehow a bit wanting.
Director: Vlad Petri
Screenwriters: Lavinia Braniste, Vlad Petri
Voice cast: Victoria Stoiciu, Ilinca Harnut
Producer: Monica Lazurean-Gorgan
Editors: Dragos Apetri, Catalin Cristutiu, Vlad Petri
Sound editors: Filip Muresan, Vlad Voinescu
Production companies: Activ Docs, Restart
World sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Forum)
In Romanian, Farsi
68 minutes