In an unflinching account of abuse in Iran opens at Berlin

BERLIN In Where God is Not Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon's unflinching account of the torture of former political prisoners in Iran, the director asks his interviewees to relive the horrors of their incarceration.

The film which opened on Saturday at the Berlin International Film Festival as part of a double-bill about abuse in Iranian prisons spotlights torture practices the director says intensified after the revolution of 1979 and continues today.

It's happening right now, Tamadon told Reuters. I'm sure that tonight somebody is being tortured in that way. The film, shot in an abandoned warehouse in Paris, where Tamadon lives, shows interviews with three ex-prisoners in reconstructed cells and interrogation chambers made from wood.

One interviewee, who said he ran a video equipment rental company in Iran before competitors accused him of spying, describes how electric cables were wrapped around his feet, lacerating his skin, and assumes the excruciating bundle position, lying face down with his hands cuffed to his folded legs.

Another former inmate recounted with tears how a small yet sadistic tormenter named Mr. Punisher beat her and other female prisoners. Taghi Rahmani, who has been imprisoned several times, reveals how he maintained his sanity while being kept in a tiny cell.

The film, which is part of an Iran focus on Berlinale this year, aims to confront prison guards in Iran with their own cruelty, Tamadon said.

He said that the objective is to show what is happening in Iran. The interrogators' goal is to see themselves in a mirror. The director asked three Iranian political refugees to interrogate them as if they were agents of the Islamic Republic because of the 16 video clips that were leaked from Evin prison in 2021, which Amnesty International described as the worst kind of prisoner in the world in a 2010 documentary, which premiered at the Berlinale on Tuesday.

The films draw viewers into the world of torture victims, said Tamadon.

He said something. It is important for the viewer to experience it in the cinema.