The famous battle cry of the Iranian women and men who oppose the current regime “Woman, Life, Freedom” began circulating at the funeral of Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody in October 2022. But women’s activism in Iran began long before that, as the celebrated case of Reyhaneh Jabbari reminds us. It is recalled with dignity and outrage in Steffi Niederzoll’s documentary Seven Winters in Tehran.
An opening title announces the film is “based on secretly recorded video smuggled out of Iran” and the filmmakers make good use of it, including many phone-taped scenes of the Jabbari family, prison visits and vigils outside forbidding walls, behind which executions are taking place. All this historic footage, cleverly intercut with stock shots of Tehran streets and traffic, serves to describe in gripping detail the personality, humanity and growing courage of Reyhaneh, whose own words are not taped, but read by Holy Spider actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi. But this is also the story of her family’s battle to save her from execution, and her mother Shole Pakravan evolves almost heroically from a minding-her-own-business middle class woman into a strong-willed activist and the organizer of those against capital punishment, making sure their voices are heard by the Iranian government and, eventually, internationally.
For audiences with an interest in Iran, this is an anguishing journey that pulls no punches in depicting pervasive misogyny toward women and the legal travesty of punishing the female victim of an assault who defended herself. It also offers some startling insights into what women are facing in a society that ignores their basic rights, and how far the court system is willing to go to repress any challenge to male dominance.
German director Niederzoll stays highly focused on her subject, reconstructing the moments of terror that led 19-year-old Reyhaneh to pick up a knife to defend herself from her attacker, followed by her arrest, a farcical trial and seven long years of imprisonment as she awaited execution by hanging. Editor Nicole Kortluke does a superb job structuring the film, premising the editing on the probability that not all members of the audience will be familiar with the case, nor will they know its ultimate outcome. For those viewers there is a good deal of additional tension built into the crescendo of anxiety as Reyhaneh’s execution draws near. Here there is no question of an appeals court, but the Islamic law of “blood revenge” which allows the family of a homicide victim to decide whether to let the convicted party hang or to forgive them and stay the execution.
The story begins when Reyhaneh, a bright middle class college girl and a budding interior designer, meets a man in a café, Morteza Sarbandi, who asks her to redesign his doctor’s office. It is a ruse to get her alone behind locked doors, and when Reyhaneh realizes he intends to rape her by force, she grabs a nearby knife and blindly stabs him. Complicating matters is the fact the Sarbandi is a former secret service agent, and the lead police investigator soon turns it into a “political case”. The headlines scream “Surgeon Murdered by Designer Girl” and only after a long search does the family find a lawyer willing to take on the case.
There are scale models of a crowded dormitory but no shots inside Evin prison, where she was initially beaten and tortured while the police planted false evidence in her home, or the even more fearsome Shahr-e Rey prison (“a mass grave for 2,000 women”) where she was held for many years along with “the dark side of society”. But Reyhaneh’s words bring her captivity alive in Ebrahimi’s modulated voice, never overly dramatic even when she describes the horrors of 30 lashes or seeing a young girl hanging by her arms.
Reyhaneh the prisoner withdraws in the final act, which is more properly her mother’s, as she negotiates with the religious Sarbandi family for mercy to save her daughter. Her interlocutor is the eldest son, since the women of the family don’t count, and he is very concerned about his father leaving behind a bad image. It’s no exaggeration to say the ending is a cliffhanger.
Director, screenplay: Steffi Niederzoll
With: Reyhaneh Jabbari, Shole Pakravan, Fereydoon Jabbari, Shahrzad Jabbari, Sharare Jabbari, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Parvaneh Hajilou, Mohammad Mostafaei, Samira Mokarrami
Producers: Gilles Sacuto, Milena Poylo, Laurent Lavolé, Sina Ataeian Dena, Melanie Andernach, Knut Losen, Eva Laass, Céline Loiseau
Cinematography: Julia Daschner
Editing: Nicole Kortluke
Production design: Miren Oller
Music: Flemming Nordkrog
Sound: Andreas Hildebrandt, César Fernandez Borras, Anton Orarbrack, Guillaume Valeix
Production company: Made in Germany Filmproduktion GmbH
World Sales: Little Dream Entertainment
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Feature Documentary competition)
In Farsi
97 minutes
