On a spring day in 2007, Reyhane Jabari was in her ice cream store, all smiles on the cellphone about designing a sales space for a world commerce truthful in Tehran. Computer Her 19-year-old girlfriend, a science pupil and part-time inside designer, instantly seen a middle-aged man approaching her and that he was eavesdropping on her cellphone calls. confessed. “I’m a plastic surgeon and I wish to flip my place right into a clinic,” he stated, asking for the lady’s assist in designing the hospital. “I exploded with pleasure,” she later recalled of the day that might change her life without end: designing a commerce present sales space and being supplied one other job.
Invited to go to an house that was to be designed as a clinic for a so-called plastic surgeon, Reyhane instantly discovered herself cornered in opposition to her will. The man, Morteza Salbandi, was a former intelligence official. Reyhane grabbed a knife from the house’s kitchen and tried to withstand Sarband as he tried to rape her. In the top, she stabbed him in self-defense, inflicting his demise. Within hours, police arrived at Reyhane’s house and charged her with Sarbandi’s homicide. Seven years later, a younger girl will stand on the scaffold with a noose round her neck.
The story of Reyhane’s life and demise in a Tehran jail is the topic of German artist and filmmaker Steffi Niederszol’s debut documentary Seven Winters in Tehran, which obtained consideration on the Habitat International Film Festival. It is a part of the German movie package deal. (from March eighth to seventeenth) within the capital. German movies on the pageant embrace this yr’s Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, acclaimed director Winders’ Perfect Days, Ilker Khattak’s Teacher’s Lounge, and a collection of digital actuality movies. It might be finished.
Filmed secretly in Iran, Niederszor’s Seven Winters in Tehran might be featured on the Kerala International Film Festival in December, the Bangalore Film Festival in March, and the primary Cinevesture International Film Festival in Chandigarh. It was additionally a taking part movie within the pageant, and was additionally screened in India and Germany. The movie, made to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8 of this yr, relies on video and audio secretly recorded and smuggled from Iran, and depicts gender injustice, abuse of energy, and the continuing It is a robust indictment of the pervasive and dangerous patriarchy. The documentary options paintings and interviews that depict the tragedy of Reyhane’s arrest and execution, affirming the hope and justice within the combat for thousands and thousands of girls all over the world.
Seven Winters in Tehran, which opened the Panorama program ultimately yr’s Berlin Festival, opens with footage from contained in the Tehran jail the place Reyhane was held. Nuremberg-born Niederszol, a educated artist and movie director, recreated his jail cell by artistically setting up bunk beds. A disturbing picture that sinks deep into the viewer’s thoughts, exposing the absurdity and brutality of the flawed justice that the younger girl who dreamed of was subjected to. to pursue her ambitions within the trendy world. “It was a really lengthy journey to seek out all this materials,” Niederszol advised FE about secretly accumulating video and audio from Iran. “On the opposite hand, through the years, the household has collected quite a lot of materials themselves, together with newspaper experiences and police investigation supplies. Iran has a corrupt system, and in case you pay cash, you might not get a lot. But at the very least we will get some paperwork and a replica of the police investigation report,” she added.
The 97-minute movie options huge pictures of Tehran, sometimes shot in the identical places exterior Iran by different overseas filmmakers. “The Iranian Filmmakers Collective supplied me with entry to an archive of pictures of Tehran that they took for varied functions,” says Niederszor, who studied directing on the International Film and Television School in Cuba. . This work was conceived with assist from Colombian artist Gabriel García Márquez. Fidel Castro, then president of Cuba. Among Marquez’s works is The Secret of Chile, based mostly on a secret documentary made by Miguel Littin underneath the noses of dictator Augusto Pinoche. Iranian filmmaking activists shot up the house the place the sexual assault of Ms. Reyhane occurred. “They took an enormous threat to do that job as a result of it was a really harmful job,” says the filmmaker. His earlier works embrace the quick movie Petuhtantes, which premiered on the 2004 Beirut International Documentary Festival, and Lea, which premiered on the 2004 Berlin Festival. 2008.
“I had 1,000 pages of Reyhane’s diary, however I do not know what number of pages of letters[she sent home]. She wrote so much,” Niederszol says. “This writing was my entry to her as a result of I had by no means met her. Two years after her execution, I contacted her household. “From among the letters she took to her mom, we received a recording of what she was studying. She would get on the cellphone and say, ‘Mom, document me,’ and she or he would document it,” Niedersol stated. He defined the origin of the concept for the empty jail rooms depicted within the documentary. “I wished to offer Reyhane her personal visible narration. I had been fascinated with empty rooms and places that have been inaccessible early on. But these places inside the jail gave Reyhane her personal visible narration. It was essential.”
Director Niederzoll took 5 years to make the movie, after first studying information of Rehane’s execution in a German newspaper in 2014. Reyhaneh, who was arrested on suspicion of Sarbandi’s homicide in 2007, was portrayed by Tehran newspapers as a serial killer quite than the sufferer of a vicious sexual assault. Even earlier than her trial started, the court docket ordered her to obtain 30 lashes, which she by no means obtained, for her affair with Mr. Sarbandi. Two years later, her character was condemned by a court docket and she or he was sentenced to demise.
On October 25, 2014, Reyhane was hanged in a Tehran jail. Reyhane’s mom and two youthful sisters, who fled to Germany, seem in interviews within the movie, which is narrated by the well-known Iranian actor Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who takes his identify. She gained the 2022 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for her function as an investigative journalist. She was nominated for final yr’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in The Holy Spider, by which she performed a serial killer who murdered intercourse employees within the Iranian metropolis of Mashhad.