For seven years, Leila Amini filmed the life of her sister Nasreen in her apartment in Tehran, capturing deeply intimate family moments between a wife, her husband, and their children, but also witnessing the flourishing of a long dormant artistic creativity. Nasreen has a beautiful voice, one silenced in a country where public singing by females is considered haram by the Iranian regime and restricted to private expression behind closed doors.
This unique access behind these closed-off spaces gives A Sisters’ Tale its power, tracing not only the journey of a woman finding her voice, but also the more subtle ways the filmmaker herself is reshaped by being so close to her subject. This dance, both creative and personal, results in a subtle yet deeply moving portrait that’s both startlingly unique and eminently universal.
We spoked to Leila Amini via Zoom from England prior to the film’s screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Her producer, celebrated filmmaker Afsaneh Salari (The Forbidden Strings), joined from Paris and provided both translation and her own commentary.
POV: Jason Gorber
LA: Leila Amini
AS: Afsaneh Salari
The following has been edited for clarity.
POV: How does one tell a story so personal that also speaks to a wider audience?
LA: At first, I just wanted to make a film about my own sister, but her experiences and what she was going through were very much similar to what I have personally gone through. I know many other women in Iran who go through similar obstacles in their lives, so it was not just her or me, it was a story of many other women as well. It’s true that we focus on her concerns and her wishes, but they can also be the shared dreams of many women around the world. By focusing on my sister, because her story can be the story of millions of women around the world, the film automatically opened its door to millions of women outside of Iran.
POV: We know that making films within Iran has very specific challenges and the storytelling has very specific dangers, frankly. Can you talk about the dynamic of shooting there, but still having an ability to get the footage out, and to make the film outside of Iran?
LA: It depends on the subject you want to make a film about, and how that subject is treated throughout the film. It has always been very important to show my films at festivals in Iran, and to have an audience within the country. With this film, the difference is that I’m making a film about a woman who had a desire to sing, which is forbidden. At the same time, every woman, within the world of their houses, does not wear a headscarf, so they do not necessarily have the same dress code that they have outside in public. It was a challenge in the beginning deciding how to portray my sister within the house, but soon I decided to show the reality. After all, it’s a documentary film, I wanted to show my sister the way she is. That was probably the only time I had to detour from following the rules within the Iranian regime.
AS: This is a very fine line as well, so you have a generation of Iranian filmmakers who are now in exile, and that they make films in exile about Iran. A lot of archive films, or stories set in the past, can be very bold. Some have come out just recently in the past two to three years that are very direct, such as Mohammad Rasoulof’s film The Seed of the Sacred Fig that played Cannes. [Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison after criticising the government’s treatment of protesters, and is now in exile in Europe.]They don’t have to rely as much on metaphoric language in order to convey what they want to convey.
But we also have a long tradition of Iranian cinema where Iranian filmmakers were saying what they wanted to say through a level of metaphor. Look at Abbas Kiarostami: his films, for me, are very political. Where Is the Friend’s House? is an intensely political film, but we used to watch it on Iranian national TV. For the authorities, it looked like a very risk-free film, whereas there are a lot of deeper metaphors and a lot of symbols others perceived.
Part of the richness of our cinema is to touch things that you cannot say directly because you have all of these boundaries. It’s always like a dance, how to play around the regime, to make films that do not necessarily get blacklisted. But that line is also very blurry. If the balance is not controlled, you can also be trapped by the regime. We knew that was an issue about A Sisters’ Tale from the beginning. We all wanted to ensure the safety of everyone, to protect the director and even myself.
POV: Is this film going to be playing in Iran?
LA: There is this desire to show the film in Iran, but the question is about how to make it happen.
AS: We also discussed this with Leila before, that it could be setup as underground screenings. Iran has this underground scene for movies, for music, for everything. For now, Iranian festivals do not show films of women without scarves, and that’s the biggest issue this film has.
POV: Of all the rights that are challenged about people’s expression, the ability to express emotion through singing seems so fundamental. Can you talk about your journey to actually have your sister’s voice be heard?
LA: First of all, I’m an artist myself, so it’s very important to be able to raise my voice and articulate what I want to say. I do so with my own equipment, a camera, I know how to use the medium of film. Nasreen also wants to express herself as an artist. Her tool is her voice and her passion is singing. She used to sing when she was much younger, but when she told me that she wanted to take it up again, I saw that she was also expressing the desire to free her voice as a human. Her wish to be a musician is also a wish to be who she really is. Finding her voice as a human is intrinsically connected to this desire.
The difference between me and Nasreen is that Nasreen’s desire is forbidden in Iran by the law, by religion, and by the patriarchal society. As a filmmaker, I had an easier way out because filmmaking is not forbidden within any of these aspects. That’s why I decided I wanted to follow her. Filming her and documenting her journey would also be a support to her and empower her. I’m able to transmit my own artistic experiences to Nasreen because I was acting as an artist long before her, so we could empower each other. I believe in what I’m doing by knowing that my sister is beside me.
POV: From the outside, it is interesting, if not shocking, to have a restriction on singing, and not a restriction on having a camera given what we know cameras can do. And in some ways, restricting singing is such a personal restriction: it’s a closing of a spirit, even more so than closing a story with a camera. Can you speak to this dynamic? There’s such a rich cinematic history as you pointed out in Iran that they have not closed the cameras in the way that they have silenced the voices.
LA: In Islam, women are not allowed to sing publicly because the voice of a woman can provoke men or can seduce men, so this is associated qirh that. There’s nothing in Sharia that states filming or documenting or using a camera can be a threat.
AS: Iranian constitution was basically founded on Sharia, on Islamic law. Our law before was very much close to French law, during the Shah, and when the Islamic revolution happened, there was an adaptation of Sharia atop those laws. So some of our regulations look like the French constitution, where it doesn’t really bother anyone, and then on top of that, you have Sharia law, when it comes to, for example, women’s rights. Using the camera and all of that, these are way more new, I think, for the Iranian regime. There’s also this confidence that they can control everything within the borders of Iran, and they managed that for a very long time and they didn’t probably feel the danger. You can say that our constitution, in a way, remains archaic.
POV: There’s an irony that we see the silencing of one person’s voice, yet through film, we are having her voice amplified now greater than it ever could be because of another sister’s voice. This is one of the core paradoxes of social and religious control that she is exposing with this film.
LA: Looking at the women’s movement in Iran, not just this particular period, but throughout our history, it goes back 200 years. There has always been a certain quest to liberate, to advance, and there’s always been something behind us or something alongside us that makes this happen. Women always found ways to support each other—to detour around the restrictions and find ways to empower themselves without necessarily creating revolutions—and, little by little, opening for themselves. Symbolically, this is also what me and my sister are doing for each other.
POV: How challenging was it to have the camera on during these deeply intimate conversations, particularly between your sister and her husband, Mohammad?
LA: At the very beginning, I had a certain plan for the dramaturgy, and I used to write a lot to organize what I wanted to shoot and what scenes I would need. It all went quite fine in the very beginning with Mohammad. But as we see in the film, as time passed, the situation between them became more and more tense. There was a time when I realized that if I’m present with the camera, I’ll be adding to the tension between them. I had to put the camera aside, and only film when Mohammad is not there. I had to have respect as a sister and stop strictly being a filmmaker.
Because Nasreen keeps speaking about the fact that Mohammad is absent, at some point this absence became part of the form of the film. As Mohammad became less and less present, the film shifted even more directly to Nasreen’s point of view. By not showing Mohammad at all at certain points in the film, the film can also represent how Nasreen is feeling because she is always waiting, and always alone.
POV: How does one know after seven years that it shouldn’t go to nine years, or cut it off at four?
LA: As a director, I realized Nasreen’s journey had reached a concluding moment, and that wasn’t simply when she recorded her first song. Of course, she cannot be a singer anyway, but it was clear that my sister was finally finding her voice as a human and getting established in a certain lifestyle that she’s always been looking for. That was the moment that I thought, “OK, now this story can be told.”
POV: One of the most powerful things in this film is the apostrophe in the title. It’s not “A Sister’s Tale,” it’s “sisters’,” plural. Let’s talk about your own journey and integration as part of the story.
LA: I had achievements both for my career as a filmmaker and an artist, but also as a woman. My film is telling my story as well, and part of that is the journey the film is having by reaching audiences around the world. When I started this film, I had a lot of questions, especially whether Nasreen would be able to become what she wants to become. Yet, as we discussed, this is not only a story of Nasreen but of many women in Iran who have similar obstacles, similar concerns and quests. When Nasreen’s journey finished, I too was encouraged to see that you can also overcome these obstacles despite all of the restrictions and obstacles.
I still wants to continue making films in Iran, even as I’m now living outside the country. I have been inspired as an artist to overcome these obstacles.
POV: The two of you as Iranian women inevitably serve as ambassadors through your films, speaking for those whose voices are being silenced?
LA: Nasreen was the representative of all of the women whose voices were silenced. She was literally singing behind closed doors.
SA: For me, what really touched me about this story to want to get on board were all of the nuances I saw in this film. Many stories can come from the Global South through the media in Western Europe, and European producers work with filmmakers to bring those stories to the international scene. One of the reasons I decided to produce is that I had a bit of facility here, but it was also for me very important to tell the stories that show the nuances, that show the spectrum, that show details that can be overlooked when you do not know a certain culture or a certain society.
When Leila showed me the wonderful footage she had shot throughout the years, I realized that Nasreen is a middle class educated Iranian woman. She’s not a liberated, emancipated activist, or at the same time, she’s not a victim—a woman who’s being beaten–these two images that come from our region. In documentaries, the subjects are often either very strong, bold women, or victims. Nasreen stands somewhere in between, and that’s why she represents millions of women, with all of the nuances she has in her character. That was particularly interesting, that this voice has to be heard, this part of society needs to be heard.
LA: In a way, Nasreen is an ordinary woman, and she represents ordinary women in a society that has a basic wish. She simply wants to sing, and this can sound very banal. But this supposed banality covers the stories of millions of women like her in our society.
