Pegah Ahangarani has been receiving rave reviews for her debut feature documentary, Rehearsals For A Revolution (a special screening in Cannes and sold by the Party Film Sales). In the film, Ahangarani reflects on her turbulent experiences and those of her family in post-revolution Iran over the last 40 years. Using her own archives, home movie footage, newsreel coverage of street protests, newspapers, and interviews, she captures the heroism and sacrifice of Iranians fighting again and again to escape the yoke of political repression.
The filmmaker has been involved in movies since she was a kid, and has an illustrious acting career. Her father Jamshid was a filmmaker and activist in Iran before the revolution. Her mother Manijeh Hekmat is also a director.
Ahangarani is also an activist who spent time in prison in Iran and now lives in exile in the UK. “I left Iran in 2022,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “From January 2023, I have lived in London. I really like London, probably because it reminds me of Tehran.”
Ahangarani organises her life as if she was still in Iran. Most of her time is spent either at home or in her office. Sometimes, when she wanders around the city, she keeps on seeing streets that make her think of her home town.
“That’s how I realised I was a migrant. As an immigrant, you are not trying to discover new places but relating [everything] to the place where you were born. That is quite a sad but realistic [assessment]. I love my life in London but everything went so quickly – immigration, meeting my husband, getting married, having a baby. They’re big changes, but I still haven’t had time to take a distance and look at my life…”
Ask Ahangarani about her time in Iran’s notorious Evin prison a decade ago and she admits she tries to blank it out.
“It was almost two years after the Green Movement [the protest movement after the 2009 Iranian presidential election] and I spent one month in isolation in the prison. It was extremely scary. I was in a tiny cell. I couldn’t even lie on both sides. There was only one position in which you could rest. They would take me and interrogate me and then bring me back to the cell…”
Ahangarani is claustrophobic – and that made the incarceration even more intimidating. Although she generally has a strong and precise memory, this is one experience she has (as he puts it) ‘erased from my memory…I remember no specific detail. Probably, in order to survive, you tend to forget this kind of experience.”
“I find inspiration from reality…my father took part in the [Iran-Iraq] war,” she comments of her approach to storytelling. “His friend Davood was executed. All this is true…but then what I found interesting was to write starting from true facts, but then, as I started working with the material, I found inspiration in the images to weave the material. The whole process was about weaving and that was what I found really interesting. My whole life has been made of stories.”
She gives an example that reveals her technique. In the film, she says she had to give a presentation about her father and that was how she discovered certain details of his life. “That’s not true. I didn’t have to make a presentation. But I took each chapter as a short story and I had to write the story. That was part of the narrative of the story, saying this little girl discovers her father because she has to make this presentation at school.”
The director also confirms that she made the documentary primarily with the Iranian audience in mind.
“To be honest, festivals are nice. International recognition is always enjoyable – but I am really, really aiming this film at my own people, the Iranian people, especially now because now they are in such darkness, such despair, I think they might need a small reminder of their own courage, their own persistence in this fight…I do hope they have the chance to see it.”
As Ahangarani emphasises, cinema is in her blood. “Cinema has always been my natural background, as an actor but also observing film sets, also assisting editors. I started editing at a very early age…probably the fact that I come [to documentary] from [acting in] feature films, this has brought something special. I come from the environment of fiction and feature films – and so I have a different take on documentary,” she reflects.
Rehearsals For A Revolution was completed only a few days before its Cannes premiere. She first had the idea of making it six years ago and began to develop the first chapter, about her father. (This was presented separately as a 19-minute short, My Father, in IDFA, in 2023).
“But then it took time. I had quite a clear idea of what I wanted to do and I have a very long editing process. But I had to earn a living in the meantime – and so I would go and work on other films and then come back with my editor Arash Ashtiani and work.”
In the end, it took “three full years of editing” to complete the feature.
The fifth and final chapter was supposed to be about immigration and exile. But then the massacres happened at the start of this year, when the Iranian government cracked down on down on dissent by murdering thousands of its own citizens.
“It changed everything, the whole process of making this chapter…I decided to re-think and question the content. It was about the massacre – and then the [Iran-US] war happened. This feeling of having something spontaneous and raw in the fifth chapter is exactly what made sense.”
She talks of showing honestly her own “helplessness” on screen in these final moments of her documentary.
Ask if she feels any optimism at all about what is happening now in Iran and she pauses before answering.
“Right now, we are in total despair, total darkness, but Iranian people are resilient. That’s the definition of resilience – you think there is no hope, no way out, but they still invent something new and they find a ray of hope,” she says. “They will find a way to fight again, stand up and go on with their struggle. That is what gives us the obligation to be optimistic – they leave no room for despair…”
