Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof in Berlin: films that burn

Mohammad Rasoulof is now part of German cinema. Four weeks ago, his film “The Sowing of the Holy Feigenbaum” was on the list of candidates for the Oscar of foreign. For the German Film Award, which will be awarded in May, he is again nominated as the best feature film – and Rasoulof as the best director. The fact that he makes films in Iran has been excluded for the foreseeable future since he fled from his homeland in March last year to avoid an eight -year prison sentence, including whipping because of regime -related propaganda. The film material for the “Saat of the Holy Feigenbaum”, an Iranian-French-German co-production, was smuggled by Rasoulofs Cutter Andrew Bird from Tehran to Hamburg, where post-production also took place. Rasoulof has been in Germany since May last year.

All of this does not make a German film director from the Iranian who does not speak German, but it is enough for the country that has received and promoted him. There are contemporaries who have excited about the Oscar entry of the “Saat” because the film is playing in Iran and not in Germany. But most of them felt the nomination as what it actually is: a stroke of luck.

On Monday evening Mohammad Rasoulof entered the stage of the Berlin science college. He has been a guest of the research institute since December, but, as his principal Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger said in her introduction, has rarely shown himself there because he was too busy receiving prizes for his recent film or traveling to award ceremonies for which he was nominated. In addition to Rasoulof, the photographer Hannah Darabi, who was in exile – in her case in Paris, was sitting in Iran and, in exile, which is currently resided as a fellow at the college.

Darabi has taken in her homeland in her homeland photos that oppose the official image propaganda of the Mullah regime a visual history of everyday life in which the memory of the country's modernization is kept before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Seen in this way, both artists work on Iran's self -expression, albeit in a very different way.

Right from the start it became clear why Rasoulof appears to the rulers in Tehran as such a dangerous opponent that they have repeatedly proven him with prison, house arrest and ban on profession. After his first conviction in 2010, he said, he had undergone a process of self -questioning in solitary confinement. It became clear to him that he could not continue with the poetically encrypted films through which he became known. Instead, he wanted to show the Iranian reality as it was. Political art in Iran is badly regarded, but beauty that arose from the denial of reality is a lie.

The three film excerpts shown that evening could be seen what this aesthetic change of direction means. In the first, from “White Meadows” (2009), two men row through an end-time water and desert landscape. In the second, from “Manuscripts Don't Burn” (2013), a secret policeman kills a prisoner with a clothesklam, who also closes the nose to the man whose mouth is glued to. In the third, “but there is no evil” (2020), a recruit, which is supposed to assist if you are executed, discusses with his comrades about how he can avoid the task.

With every film, Rasoulof approaches the circumstances that he describes. This also makes the moral questions more urgent who ask his films. In his youngest, who plays during the women's protests in 2022, they have an explosive force that has no other medium.

At that time, Rasoulof was sitting in the Tehran Evin prison. There, he reported in Berlin, asked him to look at them for shift work, “but there is no evil” with them. They got a copy of the forbidden film, and because he liked them so much, he had to look at it with every new shift, a total of seven times. An official of the Ministry of Justice who visited him in prison told him about his suicide thoughts and the conflicts with wife and children who asked him about his role in the unrest. The regime, says Rasoulof, no longer works in everyday life, but many have not yet noticed it. So he will continue to make films about Iran. Even if he has to turn it in Germany.