When Reyhaneh was in prison, did she have any idea that she might be the subject of a documentary?
No, neither she nor her family ever thought there would be a movie about her. Shole and her family members took the footage so that when Reyhaneh was released from prison, they could show her everything they had done to support her and save her from the death penalty. The footage was never used to make a documentary about the case.
Especially in 2014, Shole began to record more and more of Reyhaneh’s phone calls from prison. This was partly so that Reyhaneh could smuggle parts of the self-defence letters she wrote during this time past the prison authorities by reading them to Shole over the phone. Shole then typed them up and published them, but also recorded herself to spread Reyhaneh’s voice on social media to draw attention to her case.
Do you remember how you felt when you first saw the Jabbari family’s home videos?
The first time I saw the Jabbari family’s home videos, one particular scene struck me deeply. It was the moment when Shole, Reyhaneh’s mother, is shown sitting in front of the prison, anxiously awaiting news of her daughter’s fate. What made this scene incredibly powerful for me was Shole’s expression of hope and positivity towards Jalal, the person with the authority to decide her daughter’s destiny. However, in that same shot, her hopes are shattered as she learns that her daughter has been hanged.
From the moment I witnessed this scene until now, it has remained ingrained in my memory. It evoked a profound sense of connection with Shole and her family. Despite Jean Luc Godard’s assertion that reality is like a poorly written script, I believe this scene disproves that notion. It’s a raw and poignant depiction of the harsh realities faced by the Jabbari family, and it left a lasting impact on me.
What were your biggest challenges while making Seven Winters in Tehran?
The biggest challenge was to keep everyone safe. So protecting my team members and my protagonists was the highest priority. To that end, I never spoke about the film, I always kept what I was working on a secret, I communicated using secure channels, encrypted passwords, used fake details about content. …
The second big challenge was the language and the culture. I don’t speak Persian and have never been to Iran. So making a movie entirely in Persian that is set almost entirely in Iran comes with a lot of obstacles. On the one hand, I did a lot of research, read books and tried to gain a deeper understanding of the culture and cultural codes. On the other hand, of course, I also needed a lot of support from Iranian filmmakers, which fortunately I always got. Since it would be very dangerous for Iranian filmmakers to make a movie about Reyhaneh, but they really wanted her story to be told — that helped me a lot.
What was the most difficult part of her story to translate to film?
The most challenging aspect of translating Reyhaneh’s story into a film was condensing it into a runtime of less than 100 minutes. Her story is incredibly complex, with numerous details and subplots that we had to omit due to time constraints. Personally, it took me a considerable amount of time to make the decision to exclude much of the evidence supporting Reyhaneh’s claim of self-defence.
There were various elements, such as, for example, the presence of drugs in her drink that she hadn’t consumed, a phantom image she created of Sheikhi that vanished, condoms found on the bed, and her phone call to the ambulance after the incident, during which she waited until the ambulance arrived before leaving the scene. However, at one point, I realised that my role as a filmmaker wasn’t to prove Reyhaneh’s narrative but rather to illuminate the discriminatory structures at play behind her story. Therefore, I made the conscious decision to focus on highlighting these systemic issues rather than delving deeply into the evidentiary aspects of her case.
