Sarajevo Film Festival 2024

The perilous path of exposing corruption

IRAN / Examining Iran's lack of free media and the risks faced by those, like Roohallah Zam, who dare to challenge the clerical elite's authority.
Director: Nahid Persson
Producer: RealReel Doc AB
Distributor: ARTE GEIE, SRT, DR2, SVT
Country: Sweden

Presented in the FIPADOC international competition, Son of the Mullah by Nahid Persson Sarvestani is a close and poignant look into – as it turned out – the last months of life of Iranian dissident journalist Roohallah Zam, whose execution in Iran in late 2020, has given rise to widespread international condemnation. He was a son of the influential government official and the mullah, Roohallah Zam, who was tirelessly uncovering the crimes and shocking hypocrisy of the Iranian regime in his Amad News channel, which, at a peak point, reached over 1.4 million people. He was widely considered an influential figure in the 2017 anti-government protests in Iran, and hence became a target of major international secret service operations involving undercover agents, embassies’ officials, and spies attempting to punish him and unveil his informers.

Son of the Mullah Nahid Persson
Son of the Mullah, a film by Nahid Persson

Amad News presented coverage of events happening in different places in Iran through films shot with mobile devices by people seeing them on the streets. It was also engaged in disclosing cases of startling corruption and misconduct of the Iranian regime’s highest officials and their families. In a country with no free, independent media and one ruled by a small, clerical elite, both lines of information become the highest crimes against the government, endangering its right to rule. The reality of everyday life in the country, as seen on the mobile phone footage, is deeply disturbing and cruel, with numerous snippets of brutal beatings by the police, smaller and bigger protests, and detention centers’ interiors. They all create a broad social and political canvas on which a personal history of Roohallah Zam and his family gleans shadows of a massive human tragedy and a sense of mission to overcome vicious governmental forces crushing everything around them.

In a country with no free, independent media and one ruled by a small, clerical elite, both lines of information become the highest crimes against the government, endangering its right to rule.

Genre bending

As always, in such circumstances, a world of fighters with governmental powers is wrapped in secrecy, coded language, allusions, clues, schemes, and suspicions. Roohallah Zam, in his work of unveiling the biggest cases of systemic corruption and violation, relied on a network of informers for whom securing their privacy equaled the ability to survive. He was guarding their identity, having access to sources that were sending information often on their own initiative and through many intermediaries. Working from a small apartment hidden somewhere under the protection of the French police (he was granted refugee status in France), he himself was not able to move freely due to constant death threats. He could only do as much as his informers and collaborators told him. Son of the Mullah director – Nahid Persson Sarvestani (Prostitution Behind the Veil; My Stolen Revolution; Be My Voice) – meets Roohallah Zam at the very beginning of 2019, just a few months before his sudden departure to Iraq, where he was kidnapped and forcefully transported to Tehran in October 2019. The footage from the official Iranian sources shows his further lots: First trial and the death sentence in February 2020, and the final sentence and execution in December 2020.

Son of the Mullah starts as a political thriller ingrained in the street footage, often shaky and incomplete, reflecting a sense of urgency and anxiety. A tension arising out of numerous phone conversations with distant informers about activities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and officials, the death threats, and a general sense of danger are gripping and affecting all involved, including Roohallah Zam’s two daughters. The perspective of various members of his family shows a wide array of choices an individual faces living in an oppressive society – from disavowal to indifference to despair. With a sudden whirl of events accompanying Zam’s decision to leave France for Iraq, the film changes into an investigation of the reasons behind his departure from relative safety. Conversations with friends reveal a tight net the Iranian secret service spread out around him and is spreading around many others who oppose the regime. The hidden camera footage of sensitive meetings and snippets of Iranian TV programs show informal and formal means used by the Iranian government against those who are brave enough to show its true face.

The execution of Roohallah Zam just four days after the Supreme Court upheld the earlier death sentence in December 2020 stirred wide international outcry, including the UN, EU, and various European governments’ official statements of condemnation. Roohallah Zam was charged with suspected collaboration with the foreign governments of the US, Israel, and France, in what Amnesty International described as «a grossly unfair trial.» For nine months since his abduction in Iraq, Zam was unable to contact either his lawyer or family. Throughout this time, Iranian TV was regularly airing propaganda programmes discrediting him and the enforced interviews in which he was asked about minute details of contacting his informers. In one of the interviews, the interviewer told him what happened to Amad News channel after his arrest – the Revolutionary Guard put a sign of the state official media in the Amad News’ studio, and then instantly, within less than a minute, over one million people that have been following the channel disappeared. None stayed.

Son of the Mullah Nahid Persson
Son of the Mullah, a film by Nahid Persson

A timely reminder

For a member of the Revolutionary Guards, it has been a sign of success and a source of pride for everyone else – a sign of the following brutal, blinded, and abominable activity. There are many people remembering Roohallah Zam, for whom his work has been an inspiration, and also, many people are currently being executed by the Iranian regime in an unending and still rising surge of death sentences after the 2022 wave of anti-government protests. According to UN experts, there were 834 people executed in 2023, and all of them faced unfair trials with no access to a lawyer and often did not know what the charges were. Son of the Mullah is, in this context, a timely reminder of human bravery, determination, and enormous pain hidden behind each of these cases.



(You can also read and follow the blog Cinepolitical of our editor Truls Lie on X.)
Aleksandra Biernacka
Aleksandra Biernacka
Anthropologist and sociologist of culture. She is a regular contributor to Modern Times Review.

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