‘The Mahnaz who went to prison was a different person. When I came out, my identity was shattered’: Mahnaz Mohammadi. Photograph: Peter Chappell View image in fullscreen ‘The Mahnaz who went to prison was a different person. When I came out, my identity was shattered’: Mahnaz Mohammadi. Photograph: Peter Chappell Film Interview ‘I’m a soldier. I don’t have a gun, but I have a pen and a camera’: Mahnaz Mohammadi on fighting the Iranian regime Cath Clarke The director and activist on her fictional drama Roya, drawing on her experience of imprisonment and torture, and why even in Europe she feels unsafe
Prefer the Guardian on Google M ahnaz Mohammadi is a survivor. The Iranian film-maker and women’s rights activist has been arrested on many occasions and imprisoned several times. In 2011, she was held for months in solitary confinement and tortured. In 2014, she was sentenced to five years and spent several months in prison. A few years ago, she met one of her first interrogators, from an early arrest.
“Do you know what he said to me?” she says. “He said he told his colleagues that after doing all those things, if I were going back behind the camera, it meant they couldn’t do anything with me. When I heard this from his mouth, I thought: ‘He’s right! Nobody can hurt me.’”
Still, Mohammadi is constantly looking over her shoulder. She left Iran to finish her most recent film and is staying in Europe on a three-year visa. Recently, a journalist disclosed the city in which she lives: “I thought, now I have to move. I’m not afraid of dying but I don’t feel safe. It’s not a good feeling.”
We meet at her friend’s house in a leafy street in London. Mohammadi, 51, is visiting to screen two new films. She has a gentle manner; her voice barely rises above a whisper at times. But her gaze is steady: “You can ask me anything.”
For years, she wanted to make a film about prison, but hesitated. Partly because of the reaction when she talked about her experiences. Sometimes, people just didn’t want to hear it. There were friends who rolled their eyes. “They’d say: ‘Do you want credit for being in prison?’ I’d say to them: ‘You don’t have any idea of what happened in there.’” It left her more isolated. “I thought maybe I’d just be quiet.”
Now, she has written and directed the extraordinary fictional drama Roya – drawing on her own and others’ lived experiences of prison. It’s a harrowing watch, but not graphic. She says: “I censored a lot.” The film tells the story of a university professor, Roya, played by Melisa Sözen, who is Turkish (“I don’t want an Iranian to put their life in danger just for a film,” says Mohammadi). Roya is accused of inciting her students to burn their headscarves. Like Mohammadi in 2011, she is held for months in solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless prison cell in the notorious Evin prison and tortured. The light flickers constantly. It’s impossible to tell if it’s day or night.
View image in fullscreen ‘I don’t want an Iranian to put their life in danger just for a film’: Roya, starring the Turkish actor Melisa Sözen. Photograph: Pakfilm It is an unsettling, experimental film, unfolding with the logic of a nightmare. For the first 20 minutes or so it is shot entirely from Roya’s point of view. When a female guard takes her from her cell to be interrogated, the audience is under the all-covering chador with Roya – part-blindfolded, barely able see more than her feet as she is rough-handled along a corridor. The details…