“Rehearsals for a Revolution”, interview with director Pegah Ahangarani

Winner of the L’Œil d’Or for best documentary at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered as a Special Screening, Rehearsals for a Revolution is the debut feature by Iranian actress and director Pegah Ahangarani. Built entirely from personal archives, home videos, protest footage, animations and voice recordings, the film traces over four decades of Iranian history through five portraits of people who shaped Pegah Ahangarani‘s life, relatives and mentors whose individual stories mirror the cycles of repression and resistance that have defined the country since 1979. Sentenced to eighteen months in prison in 2013 and a refugee in the United Kingdom since 2022, Pegah Ahangarani turns her own biography into a lens through which a nation’s unfinished revolution comes into focus.her own biography into a lens through which a nation’s unfinished revolution comes into focus.

Six years and a short film to find the courage

The idea for “Rehearsals for a Revolution” goes back six years, but Pegah Ahangarani knew from the start that she wanted a film made entirely of narration and archival material, with no conventional on-camera interviews. To test whether that approach could sustain itself, she made a short film, “I’m Trying to Remember”, which premiered at IDFA. “That project was successful, and then I made the first chapter of this feature, which premiered at IDFA. Gradually, I gained the confidence that I could carry a 90-minute film forward using this subjective approach of voice and archive as image”.

A letter to the next generation

When the project began, Pegah Ahangarani had no children. Midway through the edit, she discovered she was pregnant, and something shifted. She told her editor, Arash, in secret, and proposed a new dimension for the film. “I told him, ‘I have a secret to confess: I’m pregnant… maybe the film could turn into a sort of letter to my child.’ I didn’t want it to be explicitly a ‘letter-film,’ but I wanted to convey the idea that these are all stories we must tell the next generation”. That impulse, the need to pass memory forward, became the emotional spine of the entire project.

Women at the front line

Asked whether the future of Iran lies with its women, Pegah Ahangarani does not hesitate. She points to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement as something unprecedented in the country’s history. “People took to the streets with a clear demand and brought what they wanted for the future into the present moment. They took off their veils and burned them that very night”. What struck her most was the movement’s intelligence: rather than describing a desired future, the protesters enacted it. Pegah Ahangarani sees this as the most progressive chapter in forty years of uprisings, and she is unequivocal about what it means: if Iran changes, it will be because of its women.

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