Encore Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV / Stream now with the PBS App
Last fall, anti-government protests swept across Iran after the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, who was accused of not adhering to the Islamic regime’s strict dress code. In the crackdown on protests that followed, human rights groups estimate that more than 500 Iranians have been killed, including 72 children.
In a country where journalists are tightly controlled, young Iranians have been filming the uprising themselves and posting the videos online. For more than six months, FRONTLINE has been gathering and reviewing over 100 hours of this footage, cross-checking it with testimony from eyewitnesses and protestors, and following activists and exiles who have been gathering evidence of human rights violations.
The resulting documentary, "Inside the Iranian Uprising," features the harrowing stories of protestors, some of whom are still in the country and are speaking out despite the risks, and it sheds new light on the lengths to which the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has gone to put down the uprising.
“The people are now like a volcano,” one interviewee says. “I am a volcano.” With a trove of footage filmed by protestors, the documentary by Iranian filmmaker and director Majed Neisi and Emmy Award-winning producer Sasha Joelle Achilli traces how the protests began in the Kurdish parts of Iran and spread throughout the country — and how the authorities responded with force.
The film covers the deaths of two teenage girls who died in the protests, and follows activists like Zar Amir Ebrahimi as they interview protestors and grieving relatives. Ebrahimi, an Iranian actor who fled the country in 2008, says in the film, “These youngsters have become the symbols of the people striving for freedom. They did not want big things. All they wanted was to be able to live a normal life and be able to freely enjoy singing and dancing. ... They wanted the road to be open for them.”
The documentary shows how, in the wake of the teenagers’ deaths, children across Iran began to hold school protests. “It seems this generation doesn't have the fear that mine and the one before me had. They are less fearful,” says Shiva Nazarahari, a human rights activist who was jailed four times in Iran. “They have learnt to be brave, to fight for their rights. This lifestyle is forced upon us and this generation won’t accept it. My generation tolerated it, but ‘Gen-Z’ cannot.”
As the protests inside the country spread, the regime’s crackdown intensified. “Wounds from military bullets were very deep,” Keivan, a medical student who helped treat injured protesters in Iran’s Kurdistan region, says in the documentary. The documentary examines accounts of protesters locked up in makeshift prisons where they say they were tortured and sexually abused. Keivan himself says he was detained, tortured and raped by Iranian security forces for helping protestors — an account that echoes the testimony of many other detainees.
Iran has denied abusing prisoners and its supreme leader has said the protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s death were a plot by Iran’s enemies. With the regime continuing to prosecute and in some cases execute protestors, "Inside the Iranian Uprising" is an unflinching look at the movement that rocked the country and put its leaders under unprecedented pressure.
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"Inside the Iranian Uprising" became available to stream starting Thursday, June 29, 2023, at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
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Credits: A Passion Pictures production for GBH/FRONTLINE in association with BBC and RAI. The producer and director is Majed Neisi. The producer is Sasha Joelle Achilli. The senior producer is Dan Edge. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
