The day after filmmaker Pegah Ahangarani debuted her documentary about Iranian freedom fighters, Rehearsals for a Revolution, last Saturday afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival, U.S. President Donald Trump declared “the clock is ticking” on her home country. The next day, as Ahangarani answered reporters’ questions on a sunny terrace, Trump said he was calling off a looming military strike, then quickly turned around and told White House reporters that he’d ordered the Pentagon to start a full-scale military assault “at a moment’s notice” if talks fell through.
Then on Friday, the penultimate day of the Cannes Film Festival, she won the L’Oeil d’Or (or Golden Eye) for the festival’s best documentary amid a ray of hope: Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, had just arrived in Tehran as part of a delegation aimed at ending the war.
“Of course it feels strange to be in a fancy place and to dress up and go on the red carpet when your country is at war,” Ahangarani told me earlier in the week through a translator, “but at the same time it’s not different from all the other moments of our lives. We’re in exile.”
The documentary, which played out of competition as a special screening, takes place across five chapters, each dedicated to a person Ahangarani loves — her father, an uncle, a teacher, a university friend — who was either killed, or imprisoned, or forced to flee Iran in the fight for democracy. She also narrates the entire film, with a powerful and poetic script about faulty memories, loss and longing, overlaying shockingly raw footage she either found or risked her life to shoot herself.
