On a spring day in 2007, Reyhane Jabari was in her ice cream shop, all smiles on the phone about designing a booth for an international trade fair in Tehran. Computer Her 19-year-old girlfriend, a science student and part-time interior designer, immediately noticed a middle-aged man approaching her and that he was eavesdropping on her phone calls. confessed. “I'm a plastic surgeon and I want to turn my place into a clinic,” he said, asking for the girl's help in designing the hospital. “I exploded with excitement,” she later recalled of the day that would change her life forever: designing a trade show booth and being offered another job.
Invited to visit an apartment that was to be designed as a clinic for a so-called plastic surgeon, Reyhane suddenly found herself cornered against her will. The man, Morteza Salbandi, was a former intelligence official. Reyhane grabbed a knife from the apartment's kitchen and tried to resist Sarband as he tried to rape her. In the end, she stabbed him in self-defense, causing his death. Within hours, police arrived at Reyhane's home and charged her with Sarbandi's murder. Seven years later, a young woman will stand on the scaffold with a noose around her neck.
Reyhane's life story
Shot in secret in Iran, Niederszor's Seven Winters in Tehran will be featured at the Kerala International Film Festival in December, the Bangalore Film Festival in March, and the first Cinevesture International Film Festival in Chandigarh. It was exhibited at some festivals and was also screened in India.
Seven Winters in Tehran, which opened the Panorama program at last year's Berlin Festival, opens with footage from inside the Tehran prison where Reyhane was held. Nuremberg-born Niederszol, a trained artist and film director, recreated his prison cell by artistically constructing bunk beds. A disturbing image that sinks deep into the viewer's mind, exposing the absurdity and brutality of the flawed justice that the young woman who dreamed of was subjected to. To pursue her ambitions in the modern world. “It was a very long journey to find all this material,” Niederszol told FE about secretly collecting video and audio from Iran. “On the other hand, over the years, the family has collected a lot of material themselves, including newspaper reports and police investigation materials. Iran has a corrupt system, and if you pay money, you may not get much. But at least we can get some documents and a copy of the police investigation report,” she added.
The 97-minute film features wide shots of Tehran, typically shot in the same locations outside Iran by other foreign filmmakers. “The Iranian Filmmakers Collective provided me with access to an archive of shots of Tehran that they took for various purposes,” says Niederszor, who studied directing at the International Film and Television School in Cuba. . This work was conceived with support from Colombian artist Gabriel García Márquez. Fidel Castro, president of Cuba at the time. Among Marquez's works is The Secret of Chile, based on a secret documentary made by Miguel Littin under the noses of dictator Augusto Pinoche. Iranian filmmaking activists shot up the apartment where the sexual assault of Ms. Reyhane took place. “They took a huge risk to do this job because it was a very dangerous job,” says the filmmaker. His previous works include the short film Petuhtantes, which premiered at the 2004 Beirut International Documentary Festival, and Lea, which premiered at the 2004 Berlin Festival. 2008.
“I had 1,000 pages of Reyhane's diary, but I don't know how many pages of letters[she sent home]. She wrote a lot,” says Niederszol. “This writing was my access to her because I had never met her. Two years after her execution, I contacted her family. “From some of the letters she took to her mother, we got a recording of what she was reading. She would get on the phone and say, 'Mom, record me,' and she would record it,” Niedersol said. He explained the origin of the idea for the empty prison rooms depicted in the documentary. “I wanted to give Reyhane her own visual narration. I had been thinking about empty rooms and locations that were inaccessible early on. But these locations within the prison gave Reyhane her own visual narration. It was very important.”
Director Niederzoll took five years to make the film, after first reading news of Rehane's execution in a German newspaper in 2014. Reyhaneh, who was arrested on suspicion of Sarbandi's murder in 2007, was portrayed by Tehran newspapers as a serial killer rather than the victim of a vicious sexual assault. Even before her trial began, the court ordered her to receive 30 lashes, which she never received, for her affair with Mr. Sarbandi. Two years later, her character was condemned by a court and she was sentenced to death.
On October 25, 2014, Reyhane was hanged in a Tehran prison. Reyhane's mother and two younger sisters, who fled to Germany, appear in interviews in the film, which is narrated by the famous Iranian actor Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who takes his name. She won the 2022 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for her role as an investigative journalist. She was nominated for last year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in The Holy Spider, in which she played a serial killer who murdered sex workers in the Iranian city of Mashhad.
