‘Where God is Not’: Iranian filmmaker recounts torture with his new documentary

By AFP

PARIS: One man mimes his bones being broken, a woman recounts her surrender to spiritual brainwashing, and a third man replicates his confinement in a tiny jail cell.

With his new documentary “Where God is Not”, French-Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon hopes that the testimonies of former detainees who say they’ve been tortured in Iran will “unsettle” just a few of their persecutors.

All recount abuse that occurred sooner than the protests that for the time being are shaking Iran, from the brutal repression of the Nineteen Eighties throughout the quick aftermath of the revolution up until the ultimate decade.

Mehran Tamadon

But “everything I am filming speaks of today,” said the director who was born to communist dad and mother in Iran in 1972, nonetheless fled to France alongside along with his mother as a child.

“Right now, there are people being tortured in prison in Iran.”

Iranian authorities have arrested a whole lot since nationwide protests broke out following the September 16 demise in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly breaching the nation’s strict costume tips for ladies.

Security forces have moreover killed 537 of us in the midst of the crackdown, Norway-based Iran Human Rights watchdog says.

“For 43 years,” given that 1979 revolution that put in an Islamic theocracy throughout the nation, Iran has been throughout the grips of a “totalitarian system”, said Tamadon, an architect who turned to cinema throughout the first decade of the millennium when he lived in Tehran.

After 2009 documentary “Bassidji” (“Basij”) by which he interviewed members of the paramilitary volunteer energy, the atheist engaged in dialog with 4 clerics for his 2014 work “Iranian”.

The authorities have been so unhappy with him that they confiscated his passports.

Russian roulette

After they returned them to him in 2012, he decided to go away Iran, the place he says violence has turn into so ingrained that, “like a Russian roulette”, it might probably strike at any time.

In “Where God is Not”, which premiered on the Berlinale in February, 50-year-old Mazyar welds a metal mattress physique identical to the one he was tortured on after being detained for alleged spying and murder.

It was there the as quickly as enterprise supervisor was tied up, and his torturers broke the bones of his toes with a metal rod, he says.

When he was not able to stroll, he was dragged in entrance of a digital digital camera to confess to crimes he had certainly not devoted.

Also throughout the film, Homa, a Marxist girl who was detained in an overcrowded jail throughout the Nineteen Eighties, breaks down in tears as she recounts being so blasted with limitless religious chants that she woke up in some unspecified time in the future brainwashed and commenced to want.

Taghi Rahmani, a political activist who was locked up for 15 years for his views, re-enacts his confinement in a tiny Parisian cellar.

“I spent six months like this,” he said, counting out the three steps between the two partitions of a former cell.

Rights groups have prolonged lambasted the utilization of torture in Iranian jails, with Amnesty International in a September 2020 report detailing methods along with beatings, floggings, electrical shocks, stress positions, mock executions, water-boarding and sexual violence.

The group said in March that throughout the crackdown on the protest movement teenager protesters as youthful as 12 have been being subjected to torture that included electrical shocks and rape.

A torturer’s conscience

In a second film moreover due out this yr, “Mon Pire Ennemi” (“My Worst Enemy”), Tamadon asks award-winning Iranian-French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi to step into the sneakers of her interrogators.

Becoming her sufferer, the filmmaker permits her to matter him to the an identical humiliation she says she endured by the fingers of regime brokers after a intercourse tape that features her and her boyfriend was leaked on-line in 2006.

In one scene, she forces him to strip all the best way right down to his underwear.

“I enjoyed destroying you with the words I said,” she says in path of the tip of the film.

Tamadon says he hopes every works will possible be ample to make some members of the regime in Iran re-examine their actions.

“Many of the questions I ask my characters about a torturer’s conscience are in fact directly aimed at them,” he said.

“Maybe this will plant a seed that will grow into something later on.”

Rahmani, the political activist who has lived in France for over a decade, does not think about each “Where God is Not” or “My Worst Enemy” can lead to any redemption.

But all of the issues in them “is happening at the moment in Iran. By speaking up, I’m trying to denounce it,” he said.

His private partner, distinguished rights defender Narges Mohammadi, is jailed in Tehran’s Evin jail.

“As my wife is well known, she isn’t tortured physically. But she’s in solitary confinement,” he said.

“Whenever she suffers, I also suffer.”

PARIS: One man mimes his bones being broken, a woman recounts her surrender to spiritual brainwashing, and a third man replicates his confinement in a tiny jail cell.

With his new documentary “Where God is Not”, French-Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon hopes that the testimonies of former detainees who say they’ve been tortured in Iran will “unsettle” just a few of their persecutors.

All recount abuse that occurred sooner than the protests that for the time being are shaking Iran, from the brutal repression of the Nineteen Eighties throughout the quick aftermath of the revolution up until the ultimate decade.googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.present(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); );

Mehran TamadonBut “everything I am filming speaks of today,” said the director who was born to communist dad and mother in Iran in 1972, nonetheless fled to France alongside along with his mother as a child.

“Right now, there are people being tortured in prison in Iran.”

Iranian authorities have arrested a whole lot since nationwide protests broke out following the September 16 demise in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly breaching the nation’s strict costume tips for ladies.

Security forces have moreover killed 537 of us in the midst of the crackdown, Norway-based Iran Human Rights watchdog says.

“For 43 years,” given that 1979 revolution that put in an Islamic theocracy throughout the nation, Iran has been throughout the grips of a “totalitarian system”, said Tamadon, an architect who turned to cinema throughout the first decade of the millennium when he lived in Tehran.

After 2009 documentary “Bassidji” (“Basij”) by which he interviewed members of the paramilitary volunteer energy, the atheist engaged in dialog with 4 clerics for his 2014 work “Iranian”.

The authorities have been so unhappy with him that they confiscated his passports.

Russian roulette

After they returned them to him in 2012, he decided to go away Iran, the place he says violence has turn into so ingrained that, “like a Russian roulette”, it might probably strike at any time.

In “Where God is Not”, which premiered on the Berlinale in February, 50-year-old Mazyar welds a metal mattress physique identical to the one he was tortured on after being detained for alleged spying and murder.

It was there the as quickly as enterprise supervisor was tied up, and his torturers broke the bones of his toes with a metal rod, he says.

When he was not able to stroll, he was dragged in entrance of a digital digital camera to confess to crimes he had certainly not devoted.

Also throughout the film, Homa, a Marxist girl who was detained in an overcrowded jail throughout the Nineteen Eighties, breaks down in tears as she recounts being so blasted with limitless religious chants that she woke up in some unspecified time in the future brainwashed and commenced to want.

Taghi Rahmani, a political activist who was locked up for 15 years for his views, re-enacts his confinement in a tiny Parisian cellar.

“I spent six months like this,” he said, counting out the three steps between the two partitions of a former cell.

Rights groups have prolonged lambasted the utilization of torture in Iranian jails, with Amnesty International in a September 2020 report detailing methods along with beatings, floggings, electrical shocks, stress positions, mock executions, water-boarding and sexual violence.

The group said in March that throughout the crackdown on the protest movement teenager protesters as youthful as 12 have been being subjected to torture that included electrical shocks and rape.

A torturer’s conscience

In a second film moreover due out this yr, “Mon Pire Ennemi” (“My Worst Enemy”), Tamadon asks award-winning Iranian-French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi to step into the sneakers of her interrogators.

Becoming her sufferer, the filmmaker permits her to matter him to the an identical humiliation she says she endured by the fingers of regime brokers after a intercourse tape that features her and her boyfriend was leaked on-line in 2006.

In one scene, she forces him to strip all the best way right down to his underwear.

“I enjoyed destroying you with the words I said,” she says in path of the tip of the film.

Tamadon says he hopes every works will possible be ample to make some members of the regime in Iran re-examine their actions.

“Many of the questions I ask my characters about a torturer’s conscience are in fact directly aimed at them,” he said.

“Maybe this will plant a seed that will grow into something later on.”

Rahmani, the political activist who has lived in France for over a decade, does not think about each “Where God is Not” or “My Worst Enemy” can lead to any redemption.

But all of the issues in them “is happening at the moment in Iran. By speaking up, I’m trying to denounce it,” he said.

His private partner, distinguished rights defender Narges Mohammadi, is jailed in Tehran’s Evin jail.

“As my wife is well known, she isn’t tortured physically. But she’s in solitary confinement,” he said.

“Whenever she suffers, I also suffer.”