Two films at the Berlinale depict the horrors of torture in Iran

In an Iranian film, Iranian director Mahran Tamadun asks interviewees to recount the horrors and atrocities they witnessed in prison. The film is a flowing account of the torture of former political detainees in Iran’s prisons. The film was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday as part of a screening of two films by the same director about abuses in Iranian prisons. The film sheds light on torture practices, which the director says worsened after the 1979 revolution, and still exist today.
“It is happening now… I am sure someone will be tortured in this way tonight,” Tamadon told Reuters. The film was shot in an abandoned warehouse in Paris, where Tadun resides. The film includes interviews with three former detainees. One interviewee says he ran a camera rental business before government-linked competitors accused him of espionage. The man described how his feet were tied with electric wires, his skin was ripped, and he was subjected to the tortuous “al-Hazma” position in which he was laid face down on the ground and his hands were tied to his crooked legs.
Another former prisoner, while shedding tears, talked about one of the torture supervisors who was small in body but full of sadism. Journalist Taji Rahmani, who has been imprisoned several times, spoke of how he managed to maintain his sanity while being held in a squalid cell. Tamadon said that the film, which forms part of the interest in Iran at the International Festival this year, aims to confront prison guards in Iran with their brutality. He added, “One of the goals is to present what is happening in Iran… The second goal is for the respondents to see themselves in the mirror.”
Iran’s most famous prisons have topped news headlines in the past few years, after 16 video clips were leaked in 2021 from “Evin” detention center, showing what Amnesty International described at the time as “horrific mistreatment of prisoners.” The “Evin” prison is called “Evin University”; Because a large number of opposition journalists and writers were arrested there. As for the second Tamdun movie, “My Worst Anime” (My Worst Enemy), the director switches seats and roles, and asks three Iranian political refugees to interrogate him as if they were from Iran’s security apparatus. This is another urban documentary that was screened at the Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday. Tamadon said that the two films introduce viewers into the worlds of torture victims. He added, “We really can’t show violence in my documentaries, can we?! The important thing is that the viewer endures it in the cinema.