Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested along with colleague Mostafa Al-Ahmad. It was announced on Twitter by Kaveh Farnam and Farzad Pak, two Iranian producers. The two filmmakers would be taken to an unknown location. Director, producer and screenwriter Rasoulof, fifty years old and a dozen films who has always been critical of the regime, two years ago was unable to collect the Golden Bear he won at the Berlin Film Festival for his film “Evil does not exist “Because the government had not given him permission to travel. Already on his return to Iran in 2017, Rasoulof was banned from making films and traveling outside the country, accused of “anti-system propaganda” carried out by his films.
The Associated Press reported that yesterday’s arrest refers to posts posted by the two directors on social media that contained criticism of police violence. It must be said that already in 2002 with his first work “Gagooman” (The Twilight) Rasoulof had won the award for best film at the Fajr Film Festival in Iran. Then with his second film “Jazireh Ahani” (The iron island, 2005) began to have problems with censorship in Iranian. Regarding “Evil Does Not Exist” Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlinale staged four stories full of poetry. Theme of the four tales? of death, repression, guilt and the ability to take sides. It all starts with Heshmat (Ehsan Mirhosseini), an exemplary husband and father, a man that every wife and daughter would like, but at three in the morning he has the alarm clock. Where does he go? do a horrible job. Even for Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar) it is no different. He cannot imagine, he who is a novice soldier, having to kill another man, but he is told that he must do it. Javad (Mohammad Valizadegan) instead he was in the military and he killed, and he also killed the wrong man to ask his beloved if she wants to marry him will have a sad surprise.
The protagonist of the last story is Bahram (Mohammad Seddighimehr) a singular doctor unable to do his job. For him, who is ill, one last essential appointment: to explain to his niece the reason for his life as an outcast. As far as censorship is concerned, the director explained via zoom: «You need to have the courage to look at reality, something even more extremely necessary in a totalitarian regime. People in certain realities separate themselves from reality, live as in a bubble and get used to hearing so many lies, including political ones, which in the end are mistaken for true. Now it is up to the artist to tear the veils, look into the darkness and shoot light into the dark ». And again the director: “Being censored – he said – is something that I know very well and that I have experienced not only in the artistic field, but also in my daily choices, but in fact – he reiterates – it is a structure that deforms reality and I must say it is very painful to hear so much fake news. A censorship, however, which is like a curtain on the Iranian world that has isolated people from the world ».