Danish director of Iranian origin Ali Abbasi talks about a fundamentalist serial killer who targets prostitutes.
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It’s a face of Iran that we don’t necessarily know, and yet these facts really existed, in the early 2000s. A killer of prostitutes who hears “to clean” according to – he claims – divine will the streets of Mashhad, one of the most sacred Iranian cities, located in the northeast of the country. And the film tells of his hunt by both the police and a journalist from Tehran.
Daring, political, the film was not shot in the Islamist republic but in Jordan and crudely shows these feminicides taking place in a macho and patriarchal society.
“The main theme of this film is this misogyny in Iranian society. Which is obviously not unique to the country, but this story reflects that.”
Ali Abbassion franceinfo
“VSThis misogyny is felt at all levels of society: politically, socially, etc. And for me the film evokes this machismo in its purest form.” says director Ali Abbasi. With its disturbing nocturnal atmosphere and remarkably photographed and lit, the duo of main actors is the other great success of this film: Mehdi Bajestani who plays this pious man and father of a family during the day who turns into a psychopathic assassin at night, and above all the formidable Zar Amir Ebrahimi, also Iranian, who lives in France. At the Cannes Film Festival, she won the prize for female interpretation.
“We had to tell like that, be a little violent towards the spectator so that he understands what we are talking about, says Zar Amir Ebrahimi. This serial killer existed 20 years ago in Iran, sixteen women were killed. And I don’t know how we could show this violence against women with a little bit of censorship. We stuck to this idea of being radical to convey what these women went through. The film is also interesting in its last part, which shows that part of the population supported the killer, seeing in his murders a form of sacrifice.