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Mahnaz Mohammadi is a survivor. The Iranian film-maker and women’s rights activist has been arrested on many occasions and imprisoned several times. In 2011, she was held for months in solitary confinement and tortured. In 2014, she was sentenced to five years and spent several months in prison. A few years ago, she met one of her first interrogators, from an early arrest.
“Do you know what he said to me?” she says. “He said he told his colleagues that after doing all those things, if I were going back behind the camera, it meant they couldn’t do anything with me. When I heard this from his mouth, I thought: ‘He’s right! Nobody can hurt me.’”
Still, Mohammadi is constantly looking over her shoulder. She left Iran to finish her most recent film and is staying in Europe on a three-year visa. Recently, a journalist disclosed the city in which she lives: “I thought, now I have to move. I’m not afraid of dying but I don’t feel safe. It’s not a good feeling.”
We meet at her friend’s house in a leafy street in London. Mohammadi, 51, is visiting to screen two new films. She has a gentle manner; her voice barely rises above a whisper at times. But her gaze is steady: “You can ask me anything.”
For years, she wanted to make a film about prison, but hesitated. Partly because of the reaction when she talked about her experiences. Sometimes, people just didn’t want to hear it. There were friends who rolled their eyes. “They’d say: ‘Do you want credit for being in prison?’ I’d say to them: ‘You don’t have any idea of what happened in there.’” It left her more isolated. “I thought maybe I’d just be quiet.”
Now, she has written and directed the extraordinary fictional drama Roya – drawing on her own and others’ lived experiences of prison. It’s a harrowing watch, but not graphic. She says: “I censored a lot.” The film tells the story of a university professor, Roya, played by Melisa Sözen, who is Turkish (“I don’t want an Iranian to put their life in danger just for a film,” says Mohammadi). Roya is accused of inciting her students to burn their headscarves. Like Mohammadi in 2011, she is held for months in solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless prison cell in the notorious Evin prison and tortured. The light flickers constantly. It’s impossible to tell if it’s day or night.
It is an unsettling, experimental film, unfolding with the logic of a nightmare. For the first 20 minutes or so it is shot entirely from Roya’s point of view. When a female guard takes her from her cell to be interrogated, the audience is under the all-covering chador with Roya – part-blindfolded, barely able see more than her feet as she is rough-handled along a corridor. The details are terrifying. A glimpse of blood smeared on the buttons of the lift; a prisoner begging guards to bring her newborn baby to be breastfed. The sound design is battering. I watched parts with my hands over my ears. Throughout, Roya utters not a word.
In the second part of the film, she is free, released for three days on compassionate leave. Or at least, that is how it seems at first. But after months of torture and solitary confinement, it is hard to know what is real. Like Roya, we can’t be certain about anything.
The film opens with Roya reading graffiti on the walls of her prison cell, tracing them with a finger. That detail is autobiographical: “It helped me get through isolation,” she says. “Then one day, I stole a pen from my interrogator and I started writing for the next woman – ‘I was here. Now I’m not. You will not stay for ever. I’m gone. You will be gone. Don’t worry.’” Some time after her release, she met a woman imprisoned in the same cell after her. “She came up to me and said: ‘Mahnaz, you saved my life!’”
Mohammadi talks about her low points in prison. During one interrogation, she was informed that her father was dead. He was told that she had died, and was arrested. “They tortured both of us at the same time,” she whispers, her eyes filling with tears. “I felt so guilty. I was thinking I should kill myself. Because if I get out, how can I look into the eyes of my family?”
In what ways did prison change her? “I’m not the same. The Mahnaz who went to prison was a different person. When I came out my identity was shattered.” After her release, she spent almost two years at home, barely seeing anyone, supported by a few friends – “mostly women. I would cook for them. I’m a good cook.” Prison destroyed her trust, she explains. During interrogation, Mohammadi learned that some of her friends and colleagues had informed on her; she was played the recordings.
Banned from making films since her 2019 feature film debut, Son-Mother, Mohammadi is not the only Iranian director risking everything to continue working. Earlier this month, Tehran’s revolutionary court upheld a one-year prison sentence for Oscar-nominee Jafar Panahi on charges of creating propaganda against the Iranian state. Mohammad Rasoulof escaped to Germany in 2024 after being sentenced to eight years in jail and flogging for directing his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
Mohammadi defied the regime to make Roya, shooting the exterior scenes in Iran without official permission. She prefers not to discuss how she worked, fearing it might put her colleagues in Iran at risk of arrest. The prison scenes were shot in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is used to working under restrictions, fighting for everything: “I never think about limitations. As a woman, since you are born, they put the scarf on your hair. And they don’t put just a scarf on our heads. They put limitations on our way of thinking. That’s why I never think about the limitations and censorship. I only think about what I can do.”
Does it feel exposing, making a film as personal as Roya? “You feel naked,” she says. “But there are so many people inside Iran still in prison. Until the last one is there, I will do whatever I can. I can’t do big things. But I can do small things, like make films.” She recently directed a shattering documentary, Beyond the Lies , about the regime’s violent suppression of the November 2019 protests. Her current project is a documentary with Channel 4 about women in Iran.
Mohammadi grew up in a cultured, middle-class home. Both sides of her family are teachers and university professors; an uncle is a poet. “Books have been my best friends since childhood,” she says.
Her father, a businessman, played a huge role in her life. When she was released from prison for the first time, he welcomed her home with open arms. “He said to me: ‘Amazing Mahnaz. Now you’re really my daughter.’ I was lucky to have a such a dad, because some people after prison, their family rejects them. If I’m surviving, it’s because I was privileged to have such a dad.”
She got a taste of independence early. At 15, Mohammadi won a story competition on children’s radio and was offered a job. For four years, she wrote for the show, going into the radio station every morning before school. They even suggested she try out to be a reporter, but that would have required wearing a chador. She politely declined.
Working as a teenager changed her life. “You can’t imagine the confidence it gave me,” she says. With the money she saved up, at 18 she moved out of home to live on her own in Tehran. “Everybody was so shocked. ‘You have a family! Why are you living alone?’”
At university, she studied psychology, then found a job at a film company. Did she always want to direct? “No. I wanted to write books, not scripts.” Then, one Persian New Year, she volunteered at a women’s homeless shelter with some friends. She carried on visiting and eventually made her debut documentary, Women Without Shadows, about the shelter, shot in five days and released in 2003.
Now, after everything, does she see her future in Iran? “Yes. I’m going back. I’m not a refugee in Europe. My visa is for three years.” But she could seek asylum, I point out. “Yes. But I’m not just a film-maker. For so many years, I have been fighting for women’s rights.”
She continues: “My mum asks me: “Mahnaz, why I can’t see you?’ I say to her: ‘Mum, just imagine I’m a soldier, but I don’t have a gun; I have a pen and I have a camera.’”
Is she hopeful about the future in Iran, that the regime will be toppled? Mohammadi nods. “A few days ago I heard from one of my students. She said: ‘Don’t worry Mahnaz. We are gaining power for the last attack on them. Now is our time. We will do it.’ The new generation has such a big will to get rid of them. It will definitely happen. The Islamic republic is finished.”
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