One man mimes his bones being broken, a woman recounts her surrender to religious brainwashing, and a third man replicates his confinement in a tiny prison cell.
With his new documentary Where God is Not, French-Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon hopes that the testimonies of former detainees who say they were tortured in Iran would “unsettle” some of their persecutors.
All recount abuse that occurred before the protests that are now shaking Iran, from the brutal repression of the 1980s in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s revolution until last decade.
Photo: AFP
“Everything I am filming speaks of today,” said Tamadon, who was born to communist parents in Iran in 1972, but fled to France with his mother as a child. “Right now, there are people being tortured in prison in Iran.”
Iranian authorities have arrested thousands since nationwide protests broke out following the death in custody on Sept. 16 last year of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress rules for women.
Security forces have also killed 537 people during the crackdown, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights watchdog said.
Since the 1979 revolution that installed an Islamic theocracy in the country, Iran has been in the grips of a “totalitarian system,” said Tamadon, an architect who turned to cinema in the first decade of the millennium, when he lived in Tehran.
After his 2009 documentary Bassidji, in which he interviewed members of Iran’s paramilitary volunteer force, the atheist engaged in conversation with four clerics for his 2014 work Iranian. The authorities were so unhappy with him that they confiscated his passports.
After they returned them to him in 2012, he decided to leave Iran, where violence has become so ingrained that, “like a Russian roulette,” it can strike at any time, he said.
In Where God is Not, which premiered at the Berlinale in February, 50-year-old Mazyar welds a metal bed frame like the one he was tortured on after being detained for alleged spying and murder.
It was there that the former business manager was tied up, and his torturers broke the bones of his feet with a metal rod, he said.
When he was no longer able to walk, he was dragged in front of a camera to confess to crimes he had never committed.
Also in the film, Homa, a Marxist who was detained in an overcrowded prison in the 1980s, breaks down in tears as she recounts being so blasted with endless religious chants that she woke up one day brainwashed and started to pray.
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 walls of a former cell.
Rights groups have long lambasted the use of torture in Iranian jails, with Amnesty International in a September 2020 report detailing methods including beatings, floggings, electric shocks, stress positions, mock executions, water-boarding and sexual violence.
The group in March said that in the crackdown on the protest movement, protesters as young as 12 were being subjected to torture that included electric shocks and rape.
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