The Unfinal Say

A sheet of white paper with black letters on it appears on the screen. Followed by others, the pages quickly cover the blank background, at which moment the title Seven Winters in Tehran appears on the papers in red letters in a rectangle, like a stamp.

Written to her family and to the world from inside the prison, these are the letters of Reyhaneh Jabbari. In her debut feature-length documentary, opening the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section at this year’s Berlinale, German filmmaker Steffi Niederzoll tells the story of Reyhaneh, a 19-year-old Iranian woman who was arrested for stabbing a man who attempted to rape her and hanged to death after spending seven years in prison.

It is depressing how very topical the film is – a harrowing glimpse of Iran’s patriarchal, political, penal, and piety systems seen through the fate of one young woman – given that the events retraced in it date back to 2007. The summer of that year, Reyhaneh meets Morteza Sarbandi, a potential client for her work as an interior designer. But when he lures her into his apartment and sexually assaults her, Reyhaneh stabs him in the back and escapes. An arrest ensues, followed by a death sentence, by blood revenge more than two years later, and its execution in 2014.

“I’m about to be hung but I’m not afraid”, Reyhaneh serenely says over the phone. “I want [people] to know what happened to me at 19 that made me no longer fear death.” On the other end of the phone is her family: her father Fereydoon, mother Shole, and younger sisters Sharare and Shahrzad. These recorded phone calls – combined with Reyhaneh’s letters read aloud by Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2022 for her role in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider – prove more poignant and evocative than the film’s visuals.

The lack of the latter is understandable, however, as we’re told before the film properly starts that it was made from “secretly recorded video and sound material that was smuggled out of Iran” and that “unauthorized filming of public facilities is punishable by a prison sentence of at least five years”. Nevertheless, the film does have some moving shots, including a video of Shole sitting in a car outside the prison before her daughter’s execution, desperately waiting and hoping for a miracle.

To the mix of various, albeit often unclear and brief, visual materials – ranging from cellphone videos, home movies, news clips, and recorded video calls of interviews with Reyhaneh’s family members, her lawyer, and acquaintances – Niederzoll adds miniature dioramas to assist the narrative, a choice as much practical as aesthetic. A sculpted empty court room and a prison filled with rows of bunkbeds fill in for the absence of such footage. Their artificial nature also captures the Kafkaesque absurdity of Reyhaneh’s interrogation and trial, which involved planting and destruction of evidence, threats to both her and her family, torture and extortion of false confessions, all while she was denied legal counsel. But in the middle of the miniature grey prison, we also see one colourful pillow with a flower pattern that seems to symbolise Reyhaneh’s resilience and strength until the end.

The documentary has its shortcomings as well, not in painting outside the lines of a faithful retelling of Reyhaneh’s case, but in not being able to paint it fully. Reyhaneh’s and Shole’s activism from both sides of the prison walls is briefly told in bits and pieces, but not adequately shown. Moreover, what can’t be made up for, even with the most elaborate diorama, is the inevitable missing half of the story. Without the perspective of the Sarbandi family, who unfortunately but expectedly didn’t respond to requests to be included in the film, the significance of Seven Winters in Tehran is largely personal and familial: a glimpse, rather than an examination. While it is understandable that the unchangeable practical circumstances may have prevented the filmmakers from giving a fuller picture (Fereydoon, Reyhaneh’s father, is still unable to leave Iran to join her family in Germany and remains subject to persecution), they do not change the film’s effect. Thus, the stamp in the title sequence feels unfinal.