12 Aug 22 | Iran, Iraq, News and features
At four in the afternoon on 16 April 2022, Iranian documentary filmmaker Gelareh Kakavand was at home when there was an insistent hammering at the door.
“There were five security police officers accompanied by a woman. They threatened to break it if it didn’t open immediately,” Kakavand told Index.
“They locked me in a room, put a camera in front of me, and started searching the house. When I protested that this was illegal to search my house and confine me in the room, they threatened to arrest and beat me.”
After the search of her home, which doubled up as her film studio, they confiscated Kakavand’s camera, camcorder and mobile phone.
Across the city at around the same time, Kakavand’s fellow filmmaker Vahid Zarezade returned home to find his door broken down.
“Agents had stormed my residence in my absence,” said Zarezade in an interview with Index. “The intelligence and security officers had told my landlord that the occupant of the house was engaged in ‘fraud and embezzlement’.”
The couple were then taken to one of Iran’s intelligence ministry buildings and interrogated, accompanied by threats, obscenities and insults.
Their work in documentaries – which they like to refer to as artivism – had always attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.
“During our career, we have made films about political prisoners such as Abbas Amir-Entezam, Mohammad Ali Amouei and Jila Bani Yaghoub, and the problems and sufferings of life and education among Baha’is in Iran. We also covered Keyvan Emamverdi’s case, documenting cases of sexual harassment and rape, and the emergence of the Iranian #metoo movement,” said Zarezade.
“As a result, we faced security, professional, and even financial and livelihood issues. Because of a film we made about the removal of paintings in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Iran we were handed a two-year suspended sentence and fined. We were also threatened many times for our film about Entezam. I was also imprisoned for one of the documentaries I worked on,” he said.
They were threatened verbally and had contracts cancelled for refusing to bow down to the authorities.
It soon became clear that the violent April raids related to a documentary they had started making two years earlier called White Torture, based on the book of the same name by human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.
White Torture features hard-hitting accounts of torture and sexual and physical humiliation faced by prisoners in Iran, particularly those who follow the Baha’i faith, the country’s second-most followed religion after Islam. The name refers to psychological torture relating to the extreme sensory deprivation and isolation of solitary confinement.
After they were released from interrogation but still fearing for their lives, Kakavand and Zarezade made the difficult decision to flee the country, prompted by the re-arrest and imprisonment of Mohammadi.
“We were worried the security forces might have gotten hold of the hard drives that contained videos and human rights documents, so we decided to leave Iran to make the pressure less on the members of the group as well as our families,” said Zarezade.
“We left Iran in order to finish the film and to ensure the narrators would remain secure and the accounts of prisoners would be preserved.”
Index spoke to Zarezade at an undisclosed location as the pair decided on their next moves.
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Vahid Zarezade has been fascinated by the world of cinema since childhood.
“Despite my family’s disagreement, my first and only choice was to study cinema at university. Gradually, I started getting more interested in documentaries,” he said. “Society and my surroundings, with their cruelty and injustice, made the poetic and dreamlike aspect of cinema seem unreachable and impractical. Through documentaries I could intertwine concrete reality with the world of cinema.”
Zarezade soon began collaborating with Gelareh Kakavand on documentary work.
“Gelareh is a reflection of an egalitarian and demanding artist. More than being a filmmaker, she tries to create inner reflections and experiments. For example, in a film project about Iran’s mandatory hijab, she was one of those who used to walk the streets without a hijab many years ago. For many people, this was very inspiring.”
He believes that making films in Iran is not difficult but that the problems come later.
“What is difficult is the supervision and censorship that is applied to every cultural product and not only films, and this exhausts the artists,” he said. “The security system very noticeably monitors the artistic community of Iran and threatens them in different ways.”
Zarezade says filming White Torture was inevitable. “It was not me who chose to film this documentary, it was White Torture that chose me.”
“I was imprisoned years ago because of making a documentary which was never completed.
“Prison had a great impact on my life and my choices. During those years, I became acquainted with different people and thoughts. Throughout all those years, I endeavoured to highlight this both directly and indirectly in my projects. After getting to know Narges Mohammadi and becoming aware of the book she was writing, White Torture, I suggested making a documentary simultaneously.”
White Torture includes an interview with fellow Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison in July. In the footage, Panahi and his lawyer go to court to complain against solitary confinement.
Zarezade believes the White Torture, which was released in spring 2022 White Torture and won an award at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, shines a strong light on what is truly happening in Iran.
“For years, the Iranian regime claims not to have any political prisoners and that the judicial system of the country perfectly performs according to law and justice. Totalitarian regimes are always trying to create an appropriate image of how they govern the society to the world. Taking a look at prisons and the diaries of prisoners and civil right activists will make the reality clear,” he said.
“In a country where endeavouring to create a civil society is considered a crime, in a country where a women’s right activist is charged by the crime of being a feminist, there probably would be no space left for civil demands and seeking justice. They have taken a large part of the Iranian society as hostage and their propaganda machine is spreading lies day and night.”
Despite their relative safety, the future for Zarezade and Kakavand remains uncertain.
“I think we will always be concerned about being forced back to Iran. We get out of the house infrequently,” Zarezade explained. “On the streets and in crowded places, even when grocery shopping, we do not address each other in Farsi. This is because the security agents of the Islamic Republic are very active outside the country, taking hostages and even committing assassinations. What happened to Ruhollah Zam shows that it is not far-fetched for them to kidnap people in any country.” (Zam, the founder of Amadnews and a critic of the Iranian government, was executed in December 2020 after being lured from exile in France. He was tricked into attending a meeting in Iraq where he was seized by agents of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in what they described as “a complicated operation”.
Zarezade says he has now become numb to censorship.
“I have spent 40 years of my life under supervision and censorship. Sometimes I feel like I have become my own censor. To my mind, the responsibility of the art and its artist is to turn a blind eye to censorship and move around it with new means of expression. This might seem unreachable in practice but what is important is to ignore censorship in art and do your work your own way regardless. Thus, your work, just like a signature that solely belongs to you, will go through a monitoring and censoring process and the new work that comes out of these censoring processes will find its own way of publication and survival.
01 Jun 22 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
People in authoritarian countries often feel as though they are living in a multiverse, with different versions of reality. Iran is a case in point.
On Thursday 26 May, up to 100,000 people including families with children flocked to the Azadi Stadium in Tehran to celebrate the release of a new pop song. This may seem little different from, say, crowds of screaming teenagers going to Wembley Stadium to worship Harry Styles.
Calling Salam Farmandeh “pop” is a bit of a stretch. The song, which translates as Hello Commander in English, is state-backed and tells the story of a young child who is speaking to Imam Mahdi, a messianic figure in Islam who rids the world of evil and injustice. The song also references the country’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.
The pro-government Tehran Times said the song’s performer Abouzar Rouhi had risen “to national, if not international, prominence for his tuneful song” while recognising that Rouhi “isn’t a singer in the true sense of the word”.
Government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the song and concert was “a manifestation of [the children of] the 1390s [the 2010s] pledging allegiance to the Revolution”.
In an alternate reality at the same time, demonstrators also took to the streets of Iran following a collapse of a building on Monday 23 May in Abadan in south-western Iran in which at least 31 people are known to have died and scores more injured. The collapse of the Metropol building has been blamed on developer greed and corruption but the protests have become sharper following indifference to the plight of the families of the dead and injured.
Thousands of security forces have now descended on Abadan and other regional cities and protesters have been met with teargas and even bullets, with the response bordering on martial law in some cases.
There have also been protests in the Tehran suburb of Shahr-e Ray, where protesters chanted “Death to the dictator” in reference to Ali Khamenei.
“Public expressions of dissent are not tolerated in Iran,” said Hannah Somerville, editor of IranWire English, “and even less so in the border areas, which the mullahs regard as posing a heightened ‘security’ risk due to the diverse demographic makeup and higher rates of deprivation.”
She said: “The Supreme Leader’s first statement acknowledging the incident came three days too late. When it did arrive, it was desultory at best. That was ultimately what sparked the protests late last week, together with state media outlets deliberately minimising the disaster – for instance, by making reference only to ‘superficial injuries’ and not the number of dead. The head of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting openly told a group of students at Sharif University of Technology on Monday that he had been asked to limit coverage to an hour or two at most.”
By contrast the coverage of the alternate reality – the Hello Commander concert – was extensive.
“The timing of this propaganda-fest could not have been worse, and will doubtless have further incensed any devastated families in Abadan who saw it on their TV screens,” said Somerville.
Following the protests, the internet has been disrupted in several major cities in the Khuzestan region including Abadan: a tactic to restrict the free flow of information that the Iranian state always deploys during times of popular unrest.
Mahsa Alimardani, senior researcher for MENA at Article 19, says the internet has been disconnected from 5pm to early morning on most days since protests started.
The authorities are always quick to cover up the reasons for the internet shutdowns.
“The Telecommunications Infrastructure Company announced on 26 May there would be nationwide disruptions related to infrastructure changes and updates,” said Alimardani.
The shutdowns have affected coverage of the protests in the country where WhatsApp and Instagram are both hugely popular.
The government has previously restricted coverage of protests on Instagram, said Alimardani.
“We had issues with protest content removals in July 2021, when we documented over 200 cases of protest footage being removed from Instagram,” she said. “Discussions with Instagram back then led to a temporary exception during the protests to allow for the chant that was being labelled as ‘violent incitement’ by their policies to stay on. The chant is a tradition of all Iran’s protests – “death to the dictator; death to Khamenei; death to the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]”.
IranWire’s Somerville says the cover-up of the situation in Abadan is a symptom of the government’s obsession with the ‘problem’ of the country’s youth.
“The situation is even more charged because we already know several of the tens of victims of the Metropol collapse were young people, “the youth” being a fixation for both Ali Khamenei and in Islamic Republic revolutionary doctrine, hence the Hello Commander event. This is not a story the regime wants told. The protest suppression and media muzzling are part and parcel of the same effort to make sure the story stays buried along with those young people from Abadan,” she said.
The Iranian government’s efforts to hide the news from Abadan and show their own version of the world were further stymied when Iranian actor Zahra Amir Ebrahimi referenced the situation when accepting the award for best actress at the recent Cannes Film Festival.
Ebrahimi won the award for her portrayal of an investigative journalist in the Persian-language crime thriller Holy Spider, which is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who targeted sex workers in the city of Mashad in 2000 and 2001. At the time, Hanaei became a folk hero for the ultra-religious conservatives for “cleansing” the city of prostitution.
Ebrahimi said in her speech, “Although I am very happy at moment, part of my being is sad for the Iranian people who are facing many problems every day. My heart is with the people of Abadan.”
Her comments won’t go down well the Iranian government and its attempts to create an alternate reality where all is well with the world.
17 Sep 20 | News and features
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Mehdi Rajabian is once again facing imprisonment. His crime? Including women’s voices in his music.
Rajabian is a musician in Iran, where women’s behaviour and expression – including their ability to sing in public or record their songs – is severely limited by the regime. But Rajabian has been determined to defy the authorities’ efforts to intimidate him, repress his art, and silence women’s voices. “I need female singing in my project,” Rajabian told Index on Censorship from his home in the northern city of Sari. “I do not censor myself.”
In August, Rajabian was summoned by the security police, who arrested him and took him to court. He was handcuffed and brought in front of a judge, who told him that the inclusion of women’s voices in his project “encouraged prostitution”. Rajabian was held in a prison cell for several hours but was able to post bail with the help of his family. He remains on probation and banned from producing music.
It is not the first time that the 30-year-old has faced imprisonment for his art. He spent three months blindfolded in solitary confinement in 2013, and was subsequently sentenced to six years in prison. He was released at the end of 2017 after undertaking a 40-day hunger strike. “I was completely sick after the hunger strike,” he explained. “When a prisoner goes on hunger strike, it indicates that he is preparing to fight with his life, that is, he has reached the finish line.”
After his release, Rajabian continued to make music and last year his album Middle Eastern was brought out by Sony Music. Every track on the album, which features more than 100 artists from across the Middle East, is accompanied by a painting by Kurdish artist and Index on Censorship award-winner Zehra Doğan.
But now Rajabian says that the pressure on him has become so great that it is extremely difficult for him to be able to collaborate with other musicians and to finish his next album. In August, a music journalist was arrested and detained in Evin Prison for several days after mentioning women’s music and referring to Rajabian in an article.
“Artists and ordinary people [in Iran] are all afraid to even talk to me,” he says. “I have been completely alone at home for years. Coronavirus days are normal for me.”
At home alone, he reads, watches films, and listens to music by John Barry. “I am currently reading Alba de Céspedes y Bertini’s books,” he told Index. But he spends most of his time reading philosophy. He believes that his interest in philosophy is one of the reasons why his music has been so targeted by the regime.
“The Iranian regime is not afraid of the music itself, it is afraid of the philosophy and message of music,” Rajabian explains. “Artists who do not have philosophy in their art are never under pressure.”
What does Rajabian believe the future has in store for him? “You can’t predict anything here. I am ready for any event and reaction,” he says. “But I still believe that we must fight and stand up”.
“I will continue to work, even if I return to prison,” he says. “I know that there is a prison sentence and torture for me, but I will definitely complete and publish [the album]. In Iran, making music is difficult for me because of the bans, but I have to make it.”
“Encourage banned artists,” Rajabian concludes. “They are not encouraged in their own countries. Be their voice.”
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