𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙻𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚆𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝙽𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝙵𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚍

𝚁𝚎𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜𝚊𝚕𝚜 𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝙰 𝚁𝚎𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗

𝚋𝚢 𝙿𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚑 𝙰𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚒

𝙲𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Watching Rehearsals for a Revolution was not simply watching a film for me; it became an exercise in writing itself. The film is essentially a carefully edited and sound-designed work built upon personal archives and family footage, combined with images from years of violence, repression, war, and upheaval in Iran, transformed into a clean and accessible documentary. From a strictly cinematic perspective, the film perhaps does not fully occupy the space of a major professional feature documentary. At times, it even feels as though it could have existed as a podcast — something any Iranian could reconstruct simply by listening to it, without losing much.

The moment the film shows scenes from the director’s wedding and her child, there is no longer any doubt that this work is also a kind of personal house-cleaning: an attempt to archive a life for some distant future in London. For this reason, what you are reading here is also deeply personal.

One could say that anyone can write about this film. No formal knowledge of cinema is required. Being Iranian and having lived in Iran is enough.

If I had possessed a camera and known how to edit, perhaps I would have filmed all the stories that Pegah’s narration kept awakening in my mind. For years, I have carried these stories inside me like old cassette tapes, whispering them back to myself out of fear that one day my fragile sparrow-like memory might erase the aging archives of my mind forever.

I envied Pegah. Not out of jealousy, but out of longing. The longing to possess images. The longing to have been recorded. The longing for someone in your family to own an 8mm camera capable of capturing childhood, revolution, love, war, and fear. I do not even possess a short moving image from my own childhood. Only one photograph from when I was six months old and another from when I was five. So few images that sometimes I wondered whether perhaps I had been adopted from an orphanage.

Pegah’s film constantly became, for me, a doorway opening memory itself. When she spoke about the Revolution and Khomeini, I remembered my own father, who despised the Revolution. Not because he loved the Shah — on the contrary, he himself had once been imprisoned because of his courage and political resistance.

When the Revolution happened, we were living in Kurdistan, trapped between bullets coming from both sides. Sanandaj was collapsing, and all we wanted was to survive.

A few years later, the war began. Khomeini declared jihad, and my older brother — the top student in his class — was denied university admission despite his excellent exam ranking simply because our extended family contained many political prisoners. Instead, he was sent to the front lines as a soldier in a compulsory war.

He fought in frontline operations with endless Arabic names. He was wounded, chemically injured, struck by shrapnel, and still carries fragments of metal in his leg today.

I was his twelve-year-old younger sister. Every night, I went to sleep terrified that I would hear his name announced among the dead. He spent thirty months at the front. The only son of the family. A boy who had only wanted to study.

When Pegah spoke about her father’s letters, I cried uncontrollably. Suddenly, I remembered the box of letters my brother had sent from the war — letters I found after my mother died, and which I now smell almost every night. They smell of war. Of fear. Of loneliness. Of an eighteen-year-old boy inside a trench. Of grief and the repeated counting of fellow soldiers who kept dying one after another.

There is something unbearable about being forced into war and witnessing the involuntary deaths of those beside you and being forced to remove blood-soaked military tags from the bodies of your friends so they can be sent back to their mothers — proof that they were not among those who had disappeared entirely into explosions, mud, or rivers.

Perhaps one day I will convince my brother to allow me to turn those thirty months of letters into images.

In his letters, I read a constant fear for his family, because Kurdistan itself was simultaneously under bombardment. There were no phones, no internet, no communication. Under enemy artillery fire, he had no idea whether we were still alive.

Even now, whenever I read those letters, I wish I possessed just one photograph of his trench. Just one image. Perhaps that is why I spent my entire life in love with images and cameras, even though it took years before I ever saw a real camera up close.

Maybe this is why today I own something like a mobile phone museum. From the moment I bought my first phone with a camera, I began recording everything. I even took out bank loans to buy phones. I accumulated endless archives of photographs and videos, many of which I still have not transferred to hard drives because, for years, I could not even afford a computer. I am deeply obsessed with preserving moving images.

When you mentioned your father wanting to write a letter to Khomeini, my heart trembled. I have spent years writing letters to important people around the world. At every age, I kept writing, until finally I grew older and realized these letters never even reached their mailboxes, let alone their hands.

Believe me, I still have this habit.

Not long ago, I wrote a letter to Joachim Trier.

Hello,

I wish I were beautiful… like Ingrid Bergman.

I wish I had Elle Fanning’s height and presence in Sentimental Value.

I wish I were young and a powerful, mesmerizing actress like Renate Reinsve.

And I wish Norwegian or English were my mother tongue.

Perhaps in this letter, I would tell you how much I dream of acting in your next film.

Narges.

The letter was returned. But it did not matter. What mattered was wanting him to know how deeply his courage in exploring the human psyche had affected me.

When you spoke of the killings and violence of recent years, I was there too — in Tehran. Not because of courage or political conviction, but simply because I had arrived too late to speak to my mother one final time before her burial.

The internet was shut down. Flights were cancelled. And somehow I still had to reach Sundance — my first experience as a film journalist, something I had waited for so long to experience.

I arrived in Utah heartbroken. More than writing, I spoke with people there — people who often did not even know where Iran was, yet spoke confidently about its destruction.

I forgot to mention something important: after thirty months of war, only a few months before the ceasefire and the end of the Iran-Iraq war, my brother left Iran forever. None of the people around him abroad even know he was once a soldier. He refuses to speak about that period at all. We were never people waiting for political systems to reward us, neither before nor after the Revolution.

During the episode about your literature teacher, I envied you again. I was a gifted student, too, but no teacher ever placed a gentle hand upon my head. On the contrary, whenever a teacher knew my family personally, I was punished more severely.

I still remember the day in fifth grade when I told my teacher I had refused to complete my New Year homework because copying pages from the Persian textbook felt meaningless, and my hands hurt. That woman unleashed all the anger in the world onto my hands with a braided white cable.

Years later, I discovered that her brother had been executed only a week earlier, and she herself was secretly mourning because if the school discovered the truth, she would have been expelled.

Now, when I think back on it, I almost wish she had beaten me harder. I wish she had screamed louder so I could have told her that we were both mourning the same lost love. That both of us were wounded by a revolution that passed through our bodies and left its pain there forever.

That same Nowruz holiday, in northern Iran, I accidentally met an eighteen-year-old boy named Saeed. He had temporarily been released from prison for the holidays. I saw him only once — perhaps for a single hour.

It was Sizdah Bedar. Saeed and several cousins had come home from prison for the New Year holidays. They spoke among themselves constantly, and no one even noticed me, a small girl standing nearby. I understood nothing about politics; I fell in love with his voice.

The holidays ended. We drove back through the beautiful Chalous roads toward Kurdistan, and before we even arrived home, Saeed had been executed.

That was the moment I suddenly became older.

I still remember his dark eyes. Yet once again, there is no photograph. No image. Love cannot be reconstructed.

I must also speak of Ms. Shayesteh, my fourth-grade teacher. One day, she calmly said goodbye to all of us and disappeared into the mountains before she herself could be executed. Before the school principal discovered that she was a mountain guerrilla by night and a teacher of freedom by day.

How lucky we were that she escaped, leaving us only with longing instead of mourning. Sometimes I still hope she might call me one day, like the literature teacher in your film, and tell me she is alive somewhere in the world.

And then there was university.

To make my parents happy, I studied medicine. They loved the idea of me becoming a doctor. But the university felt more like a prison to me. Suspension for a simple unveiled photograph was among the least painful things that happened there.

The same people who recently accused me of being immoral for opposing war were once the people who hung me by my hair. University was nothing but fear and humiliation.

When your film mentioned Rashid, my heart sank. I mourn all the Rashids of Iran.

I still cannot bring myself to speak about the university protests. Let me continue pretending it was all a nightmare.

I worked for years as an emergency room doctor. physician on night shifts. I saw many people who turned to rice tablets to die. I still cannot forget the twenty-three-year-old woman who arrived with her five-year-old son and said:

“Doctor, I swallowed rice tablets, but I changed my mind… please save me.”

But rice tablets do not forgive. Slowly, while fully conscious, the body witnesses its own destruction.

That woman died before my eyes while her son continued holding onto his mother’s chador.

On the anniversary of Rashid’s death, I became a prison doctor.

This is where I must stop the story.

Perhaps one day you — or another filmmaker — will read this deeply personal response and decide to continue it. But the truth is, I still do not dare to tell everything. Perhaps because I still want Iran to remain possible for me. I still hope one day I might stand beside my parents’ graves again in Kurdistan.

Pegah, you are fortunate.

Fortunate because you were able to preserve everything inside you through your own voice.

My entire review comes from longing — from mourning all the stories that are never written, never filmed, and never walk the red carpets of festivals.

Six years ago, I left both medicine and Iran behind and returned to university in Canada to study cinema. Today, I proudly look at my film degree and imagine that, perhaps, one day the story of my own life might become a film.

For me, criticism itself often comes from longing — from the frustration of not being able to make films.

Even if I had wanted to, I possessed neither a camera nor a producer willing to tell the story of an ordinary human life like mine.

Your film, although filled with repetitive archival images and slogans we have seen many times in recent Iranian works, possesses one enormous difference: your storytelling voice.

Now that I think about it, if I myself were narrating the film of my life, it would probably never end. And I doubt any festival would even want to open the exported file.

At least they cannot return your film by post.

It will remain somewhere inside the memory of the festival.

Hope is the last thing I lose.

Perhaps one day, a cinema-loving “Toto “will secretly discover and watch the hidden files of my life too, and tell the story to others.

That, too, is another fantasy of filmmaking.

Please do not take it too seriously.