‘Rehearsals for a Revolution’ Review: Doc Chronicles Iranian Struggle

“The future remains uncertain” is the closing title card in Iranian actress turned director Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution, a powerful autobiographical account of the political turmoil that has wracked her homeland from 1979 until now.

“Uncertain” is indeed the right word for what’s been happening in Iran over just the past few months, with a war — or conflict or intervention, depending on which world leader is speaking — that was undertaken with no clear objective and seems to have no workable solution.

Someday there will be a good documentary about this ongoing quagmire. For now, it’s worth taking a look at Ahangarani’s gripping first-person chronicle of Iran’s recent history of resistance and repression, which began nearly five decades ago with a revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power and tore the director’s own world apart.

Composed almost entirely of archive footage, some of it shot by Ahangarani and her relatives, Rehearsals is divided into five chapters that situate her story within the greater historical events she and her family lived through.

The memorable first section focuses on the director’s father, Jamshid, who was a budding filmmaker prior to 1979, making short movies highlighting the inequities of the Shah’s regime. When that regime fell — a “most beautiful day” is how he described it — Jamshid become a fervent supporter of the Ayatollah’s new government, then a hero on the battlefield during the eight years Iran warred with Iraq.

But he grew disillusioned with the powers-that-be when learning that his best friend, Davoud, who starred in his early movies, had been sent to the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran for voicing criticism of the Islamic Republic. Despite Jamshid’s efforts, including letters sent to the Ayatollah, Davoud was executed along withother political prisoners. Any hope in the revolution died right there.   

Ahangarani follows her father’s story up with four more chapters, each of them highlighting another figure in her life who suffered under Iran’s authoritarian leadership. These include a teacher who had a major impact on the director in primary school but was forced into exile after she threw a party without wearing the mandatory hijab. There was also an uncle, Rashid, who grew up as a child of the revolution but began protesting against the Ayatollah while in college. He found himself caught up in the violent 1999 raid of a Tehran dormitory that left several dead, hundreds injured and thousands detained.

Grainy video footage from those protests reveal the brutality of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, who drag students into the street, viciously beat them and then leave them wounded on the ground. With few international news outlets able to freely cover events in Iran and local internet blackouts whenever upheaveals occur, we see images in Rehearsals for a Revolution we’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

During this tumultuous period, Ahangarani decided to follow in her father’s filmmaking footsteps — as well as those of her mother, the director, producer and screenwriter Manijeh Hekmat (Women’s Prison) — by becoming a child actor, then a professional who went on to star in nearly 40 features. Like her parents, she also picked up a camera and began shooting whenever she could, capturing family highlights but also documenting the waves of protests that broke out as she grew into an adult.

These culminate in the film’s riveting fourth chapter, set during a 2009 uprising after the contested re-election of despotic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets, including Ahangarani, who searches in vain for a friend in Tehran’s Revolution Square as police crack violently down on protestors. In one nearly uninterrupted take, we follow a group seeking refuge in a private home as cops storm the building, revealing what it’s like to experience bloody state repression firsthand.

It’s not hard to see a pattern here: protest after protest is met with jackboots, billy clubs and live ammunition, in an unbroken cycle that continues all the way through the massacres of this past January, which left thousands more dead in the streets. These were quickly followed by U.S. and Israeli bombings that began a month later, resulting in many more innocent victims.

When will it end? Ahangarani has no answer for this and is eventually forced into exile herself, while most of her family remains stuck back in Iran. She marries, has a daughter and continues to document events from afar, trying to shape them into a narrative on her desktop editing system. But it’s not easy to make sense out of so many ruined lives, even if the presence of a new child offers some hope.

Rehearsals for a Revolution is a cautionary tale about speaking up in a place where rebellion can cost you your livelihood, and quite possibly your life. It’s also a despairing tale of a family that lost several loved ones to a regime they initially supported, and even fought for in a long and brutal war, only to find their affinities betrayed by despotism.

And yet in its final chapter, Ahangarani’s dark historical self-portrait also looks forward to a time, perhaps not too far in the future, when all the rehearsed revolutions she experienced will finally lead to a real one, and things in Iran change for the better.