Dissident Iranian filmmaker Mahnaz Mohammadi — known internationally for works such as “Women Without Shadows,” “Travelogue” and “Son-Mother” — is at the Berlinale with “Roya,” about a woman who, just like herself, has been detained in Tehran’s Evin prison for political prisoners and intellectuals.
In the Panorama section entry, Turkey’s Melisa Sözen (“Winter Sleep”) plays the titular character, a teacher in solitary confinement who is being forced to either make a televised confession or remain locked up in a three-square-meter prison cell.
Mohammadi spoke to Variety about transposing the hell she went through in jail to the big screen.
Like Jafar Panahi, you’ve been imprisoned in Iran. Does this film stem from that experience?
Yes. The Evin prison is a big prison that has another prison inside. It’s called Second A. I’ve lost so many of my friends from that prison. It’s run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The jail that everybody is now talking about after Jafar’s “It Was Just an Accident” is not that jail. This place is totally something else. I lost so many of my friends that committed suicide after being in this prison, because of the way they torture you after you come out. Because they push you to confess against yourself. Which means that politically you are committing suicide. So many people actually kill themselves after that.
“Roya” was partly shot clandestinely within Iran. How was that done?
Most of the film was shot underground in Iran. But I hesitate to talk about it clearly, because there are so many of my colleagues doing this and I don’t want to tell the authorities how we are doing it since they can arrest them. But part of this film could definitely not have been made outside Iran. The other part we made in Georgia.
Talk to me about your choice of casting Turkish actress Melisa Sözen in the lead role.
After being released from prison I couldn’t go anywhere for two years. I just stayed at home. And one of my colleagues told me to watch this movie, “Winter Sleep.” While I was watching it, lonely, at home, I remember there is this moment where Melisa, who plays a put-upon wife, is just boiling with rage. I looked at her eyes and I thought: “Oh my God! We are in the same state of mind!” Then I totally forgot about it, but when I started to make this film it came back to me. I asked my Turkish director friend and he said: “Call her!” It happened just like that.
At the start of the film there is a segment in which you glimpse the prison through the character’s eyes, but don’t actually see her. Talk to me about this powerful aesthetic choice.
Solitary confinement in jail is difficult to depict. There is a camera, but it belongs to them [the Iranian authorities]. So I was thinking: “You have to follow the logic of the mind. The [visual] structure of the film is like the structure of a dream. In a dream you never have an explanation. You have to tell the story through the displacement, silence and rupture. I started writing “Roya” during the pandemic. During that isolation my body turned back to the prison. And I was thinking: “How can I go through memory and fear and find the layers of the hallucination that I experienced?” So the point of view of “Roya” was actually my body. It was a difficult choice. My producer had some doubts. But you know the reality is that in prison I didn’t see anything. So I couldn’t show much of the prison. And when I was falling down and I was trying to hold on to things there was a guy smashing my head, so I could not see them. I had to be loyal this narrative. That’s why we did it like that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Courtesy Berlinale