Rehearsals for a Revolution
(Iran/Czech Republic/Spain, 95 min.)
Dir. Pegah Ahangarani
Prod. Kaveh Farnam, Adria Mones
Program: Centrepiece
The Iranian revolution has been creating fear and love, violence and joy, and endless disappointment and promise since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. In Pegah Ahangarani’s riveting documentary feature, the path of that great nation’s trajectory is effectively recounted through personal narration and archival footage. Divided into five chapters, Ahangarani weaves an intimate tale of key moments in contemporary Iranian history through eloquent storytelling and engrossing, often violent, documentary scenes.
As an actor and director with over 40 credits, Ahangarani’s personal interpretation of Iran’s political and moral culture since the coming of Ayatollah Khomeini carries weight at home and abroad. She’s the daughter of filmmakers Jamshid Ahangarani and Manijeh Hekmat and achieved national recognition while still a teen as the star of The Girl in the Sneakers (1999) so her tales have meaning and resonance. As a director, she is aware of this, employing footage of herself in films as a means of evoking sympathy towards herself and her family.
In the first chapter of her film, Ahangarani passionately tells the story of her father Jamshid as only a daughter could tell it. She shows scenes from a pre-revolutionary artistic short by Jamshid starring his best friend Davoud as an existential figure to indicate their artistic and subversive approach under the Shah. Then, over material shot during the revolution and the subsequent Iraq war, she recounts how her father fought bravely as a soldier of Khomeini while a disenchanted Davoud was arrested and finally executed by a revolution that was beginning to eat its most idealistic members.
A pattern is set by this heartbreaking section of the film. As the chapters unfold, the hopes and—perhaps naïve—aspirations of Ahangarani and her family are constantly betrayed by the relentlessly puritanical ideology of Khomeini and his successors. In chapter two, the least brutal of the film’s sections, a young Pegah sends out photos of a party she enjoyed with her teacher and fellow female students, in which they aren’t wearing hijabs. Inevitably, her teacher was harassed and dismissed although she was allowed to emigrate to the West where her life continued unharmed. What such dismissals did to the educational system in Iran is left unexplored.
In the tragic third chapter, Ahangarani ’s guileless uncle Rashid, who, like many, believed in the mild reforms of Khatami in the late Nineties, was swept up in the brutal take down of that generation of reformists. It was all too much for Rashid and many like him, who either gave up on politics or, in some cases, ended their own lives.
The fourth and most extraordinary chapter in Ahangarani’s film involves herself and her own generation. She was part of an intense reformist force in 2009, remembered by many internationally as the Green Movement. Channeled by a belief in the idealistic philosophy of Hossein Mousavi, hundreds of thousands of young Iranians took to the streets to demand changes in the hidebound rigid doctrines of the Republic, which they felt had been behind the stealing of the electoral vote and false election of Ahmadinejad.
Rehearsals for a Revolution really comes alive cinematically in this section when Ahangarani uses her footage and those of others to show the chaotic force of the protests against what many perceived as a perversion of democracy. The violence of the repression is shown in all of its brutality. Ahangarani adds narrative force to this section by having her look for a good friend or lover in the riotous crowd.
We’re brought to the present in the final chapter, dedicated to the director’s child, Lily. Here we’re dealing with the awful events of last fall and winter when multitudes of Iranians, particularly women, were attacked, maimed and, in the worst cases, murdered by a government that refuses to allow any modicum of freedom in the hair coverings and dresses of women in their country.
Rehearsals for a Revolution is one of the most powerful films of the year. It’s a brilliant indictment of the Iranian regime and a true call for liberation of women in Iran, and elsewhere. Beyond that, it is a beautifully organized and presented essayistic documentary, a form worth of extolling. One hopes that many in Canada and elsewhere will be able to see this extraordinary documentary.
