Actor Jeremy Irons described it as a movie that "showed how a network of threads weaves between ordinary people and draws them toward inhumanity."

This came before the Iranian film There Is No Evil, by Iranian director Muhammad Rusulov, was announced winning the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival 2020, which was also shown in the unofficial section of the 42nd Cairo International Film Festival.

Rusulov condemns in his cinematic experience the regimes that strip people of their humanity by their involvement in the implementation of the execution decisions, so he raises an important question throughout the film: Can we reject what the authority imposes on us or is it responsible for our fates?

Moral dilemma

4 separate related stories of 4 different people, chosen for the purpose of carrying out the death penalty against those who were convicted, revolving around the idea of ​​the film, which also revolves in a philosophical form that searches for the origin of evil, is it a human act with political and social dimensions, or is it only Satan's act?

The heroes of the four stories are morally involved in one way or another in coercion to execution, but each of them has his own choices, so we live in the midst of 4 artistic paintings made with great cinematic skill, whether at the level of plot, scenario, filming and directing, or at the level of the repercussions of the experience between those who buried his head in the sand and decided to respond to what The authority imposes him forcibly, or whoever resisted it and did not care what it dictated to him, and how that affected their lives and the lives of those around them as well, so the four stories differed in the events, but they were agreed in context.

Can a common man be killed?

In the first half hour of the film, events seem normal. In the first story, we live the daily life of the hero, "Heshmat", with his wife "Radhia", their daughter "Zahra", and his elderly mother whom he and his wife take care of.

A simple, traditional family, everything goes normal, an employee gets his share of rice, eats pastries with his daughter, spends his salary on shopping, saves a stuck cat, and helps his wife dye her hair.

All these introductions carry with them the cruelty of evil.

The hero who goes to work at dawn after a day full of details, his task is to press the button board to carry out the death sentence, and perform his duties without having any feelings.

Rusulov delves into details when he causes the hero to prepare his breakfast, take his coffee, and press the execution button.

resistance

Rusulov succeeded in introducing characters from different backgrounds. In the second story, "She Said You Can Do It," he presents the experience of a soldier who performs his mandatory military service without which he cannot lead a normal and decent life, such as possessing a travel identity and a driver's license, all of which is subject to expiry. From military service and carrying out orders, but the hero runs into trouble when he is asked to carry out a death sentence against a person.

Here, the Iranian director's camera documents moments of hesitation, intense fear and resistance, hours of terror experienced by the hero, who must perform the task in a short time, but he decides to resist even if it costs him his life, and he succeeds in fleeing thanks to the help of his beloved, so the scene ends while they sing together a folk song that says "The president stands with his stick ... with our backs bowed ... every hour here we lose our youth," as if Rusulov wanted humanity not to be defeated by evil.

The price

Each story appears to be separate on its own, but Rusolov linked it to one fabric. In the third and fourth stories, we discover the implications of the decision, whether he decided to free himself from the power and might of power or who chose to walk with the current to avoid losses in his life.

Jawad, the hero of the third story "Birthday", the young recruiter goes to the engagement of his beloved Nana, to live in a very poetic and sweet painting. Rusulov chose the countryside - or the place - to be its main hero through the picture, but the hero chose to kill the political activist Kevan to finish His military service and returns to his beloved before he discovered that he had been deceived and that the authority had implicated him in the killing of what they called "enemies of the homeland", so he turned into a murderer, to show him that he had killed the spiritual father of his beloved Nana, who celebrated her engagement the night she celebrated her birthday, and who decided to move away from him and lose his life dream.

In the fourth story, which appears to be an extension of the second story, we follow the fate of the young man who chose to resist and decided to flee from performing military service to live with his beloved, even though he is a human doctor but he grew up on beekeeping, in a remote desert far from power and humans as well.

When he was about to die, he decided to tell his daughter that he was her true father, after she lived for years, thinking that her uncle was her father, but she refused to forgive him and left him in the middle of the road facing death, and when he told her that he had chosen the humane decision not to kill an innocent, she accused him instead of choosing To destroy his family.

An airtight scenario for a thorny issue

Director Muhammad Rusulov succeeded in presenting a tight scenario, in which he moved away from the filling and presented his idea in a very simple way, as for filming, he relied on close shots to convey the contradictory and different feelings of people, and the long shots in which he focused on the aesthetic scenes of the place in which he highlighted the state of the heroes, whether in the city with its great crowding As in the first story, or the dungeon in which the execution is carried out in the second, or the countryside in the third, or the dry desert in the last story.

It is not possible to overlook the distinctive component of the music and use the song "Qiblini", a famous opposition song issued during the reign of the Shah of Iran, and the director also agreed in managing the actors to appear in the best possible performance.

Rusulov succeeded in exposing the suffering endured by ordinary people due to the oppression of power and the ways in which it governs their destinies.

It is worth noting that director Muhammad Rusolov was unable to leave Iran to collect his award from the Berlin Festival, and his daughter Baran, one of the heroines, received it on his behalf.