Rehearsals for a Revolution – Fragmente der Freiheit

A revolution that fails is far from lost. Perhaps it was only the rehearsal for the next one. With this idea, as painful as it is hopeful, the Iranian actor and director Pegah Ahangarani looks back on four decades of her country’s history. Her documentary feature debut “Rehearsals for a Revolution” weaves together five biographies from her closest circle with five uprisings that, from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 to the most recent protests, always ended in violence and disappointment. Her father fought in the Iran–Iraq War, Uncle Rashid believed in the power of words, the literature teacher in free thought. Ahangarani herself took to the streets in 2009, was later imprisoned and today lives in exile.

From private Super 8 footage, secretly filmed demonstrations, voices of the dead and animated images of memory, Ahangarani assembles a many-voiced memory of resistance. In the process, every defeat becomes an experience that is written into the next generation. Ahangarani therefore does not tell of a nation that has learned to fail, but of people who refuse to let anyone forbid them to hope. Her documentary is thus at once a family chronicle and a political legacy: a homage to all those who keep getting back up, even when the hope of a free, democratic Iran seems very distant. In Cannes the debut won the L’Œil d’or for best documentary.