Some six months after the start of the protests against the Tehran regime, the Berlin festival wants to "give a voice to people in Iran" during this 73rd edition, underlines co-director Mariette Rissenbeek to AFP.

With the slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" (women, life, freedom, nldr) written in huge green and blue letters on the screen of the Berlinale, about fifty Iranian filmmakers, screenwriters, actors in exile held up signs calling to release imprisoned protesters.

Some, like actresses Golshifteh Farahani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who live in France, had tears in their eyes.

"In a dictatorship like Iran, art (...) is something essential, it's like oxygen", said Thursday Golshifteh Farahani, seen in Hollywood in particular in the film "Paterson". .

This year she is a member of the Jury of the Berlinale.

"We hope that hand in hand, we can change something through cinema," Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the Best Actress award last year at Cannes for "Nights of Mashhad," told AFP.

"Patriarchal system"

The actress plays a central role in two documentaries presented at the Berlinale on Iranian dissent.

Franco-Iranian actress and member of the Berlinale jury, Golshifteh Farahani (left) and Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, on the Berlinale red carpet, February 16, 2018 © Ronny Hartmann / AFP

In "Seven Winters in Tehran" by German director Steffi Niederzoll, she lends her voice to Reyhaney Jabarri, who has become a symbol of the fight for women's rights in Iran.

Sentenced to death for the murder of a man she said sexually assaulted her when she was 19, she was executed by hanging in 2014.

Based on clandestinely filmed images, telephone recordings, letters and the diary she kept in prison from 2007 to 2014, the film tells of her family's vain fight to save her.

Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who left his country after the broadcast of an intimate video causing humiliation and scandal, is a "victim of this Iranian patriarchal system, like Reyhaney Jabarri", judges the German director, in an interview with the AFP.

"I did not collaborate with this system, exactly like Reyhaney", confides Zar Amir Ebrahimi.

The actress also delivers a part of her own story in the documentary "My worst enemy" by Iranian director Mehran Tamadon, who also lives in exile in France.

The film places her in the role of the oppressor since she embodies an agent of the regime interrogating the filmmaker.

She orders him to undress, then takes him out into the street in his underpants after showering him.

Filmed naked

Mehran Tamadon, like the actress, have in real life experienced these episodes of humiliation inflicted by the Iranian authorities.

Demonstration of solidarity with the protest movement in Iran with in particular the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, at the Berlin film festival, February 18, 2018. © John MACDOUGALL / AFP

Zar Amir Ebrahimi says she had to undress in front of a woman under the pretext of a medical examination and then was filmed naked.

"The interrogation I underwent in Iran was less rough than the one with Zar, but for the film, I knew that in the end I was going to go home. In Iran, they had my passport and I did not know how many long I was going to stay," Mr. Tamadon told AFP.

Among the other works of Iranian filmmakers shown in Berlin, the animated film The Mermaid, directed by Sepideh Farsi.

It tells the story of Omid, a 14-year-old boy who stayed with his grandfather in Abadan, the capital of Iran's oil industry, besieged by the Iraqi army in 1980 at the start of the Iran-Iraq war.

"It was a turning point in the history of Iran, as we are currently experiencing a turning point with the current + revolution +", declared Sepideh Farsi during a press conference in Berlin.

In the past, the Berlinale has awarded its highest honour, the Golden Bear, to many big names in Iranian cinema, including Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation"), Jafar Panahi ("Taxi") and Mohammad Rasoulof ( "There Is No Evil").

© 2023 AFP