Four stories.

The first starts in a parking garage.

Two men carry a heavy load to a car;

as it turns out later, it is a sack of rice.

The recipient of the rice ration, a short, bearded man, drives home from the Tehran prison where he works.

He picks up his wife, a teacher, from work and his daughter from school.

They go shopping, take care of the grandmother, eat in a pizzeria.

A middle class life.

But at three in the morning the alarm goes off.

The bearded man gets up and drives to his place of work.

There he waits until five green lamps light up on a control panel, then he presses a button.

In a room next door, five bodies fall into the void.

The legs in the pants twitch, the blisters empty in agony, then the bodies hang still.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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In the second story, six soldiers lie on bunks in a room. One does not rest. He couldn't kill a person, Pouya kept shouting, but because it was one o'clock in the morning his comrades didn't understand him. “We're not with Mutti's here,” says one, and another: “It's the law.” A third offers him the job - for fifty million tomans. The fourth threatens Pouya with denunciation, the fifth slips him a paper. Then the execution begins. Pouya and a guard escort the convict to the executioner's room. On the way, Pouya gets sick. In the toilet he reads the slip of paper that has been closed. Outside he snatches the gun from the guard and ties him to the prisoner, then overpowers the gate guards and escapes outside. A car is waiting for him in a back yard.Pouya's girlfriend is at the wheel, they drive through the night, and Milva sings the old partisan song "Bella ciao" on the radio. Pouya throws the gun away in a quarry. The city lights flicker below.

The director has been in the crosshairs of censorship for years

There is a long-standing prejudice against political cinema. It is said to be non-filmic, his pictures merely evidence, his characters dolls, his story a corset. This film proves otherwise. In four attempts he circles a question that touches the core of being human, and when it ends after two and a half hours, it is still in the room. But we have seen four ways in which it can be answered, four lives that are irrevocably shaped by this answer. Each of these lives stands for many others, and yet none is just a placeholder. The man who presses the button is a being made of flesh and blood, just like the soldier Pouya and the two other men who Mohammad Rasoulof talks about in "But there is no evil" - they do not discuss, they act,and through what they do, the question of the film becomes a question of fate for them.

The question is whether one can kill on command: not in war or in self-defense, but as a tool of a judicial apparatus, as an executioner.

The fact that the film it is making comes from Iran is hardly surprising, because the cinema there is for various reasons - including the image-friendliness of Shiitism, the high level of Iranian film schools, the special situation of the country as a battleground between Islamic tradition and metropolitan modernity - one of the most exciting in the world.

What is more astonishing is that this film even exists.

Because its director has been in the crosshairs of censorship for many years.

Filming undercover

In March 2010, Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested for the first time for illicit directing, together with his colleague Jafar Panahi, with whom he was planning a documentary about the protests after the Iranian presidential elections last year. The six-year prison sentence imposed on Rasoulof by a revolutionary court was never carried out, but when he returned to Tehran from Hamburg in 2017, the authorities confiscated his passport. In July 2019, in the middle of the filming of “But Evil Doesn't Exist”, he was sentenced to one year in prison for “propaganda against the system”. Rasoulof appealed, but another court upheld the verdict in March last year. In the meantime, “But there is no evil” won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.In response, the sentence was extended to include a two-year professional ban.