Drag Race to the Bottom

C U L T U R E F R O N T tehran’s streets. they have shorn locks of their hair on the sidewalks of Mahsa (Jina) Amini’s home city of Saqqez. the response has been brutal. Schoolgirls participating in protests and waving their headscarves in defiance have been detained by government officials and banished to psychiatric institutions. Sixteen-year-old Nika Shahkarami was disappeared and killed by the regime’s security forces hours after she was photographed burning her headscarf in tehran. As this issue goes to press in December, more than 18,000 people have been arrested and 475 have been killed in the demonstrations, although the actual numbers are likely much higher. At least sixty-five of those killed have been children. Many, if not most, of the protesters are, like Amini herself, very young. their primal scream of despair and exhaustion represents an urgent, throbbing need for justice. the fabric woven by centuries of imperial interference, revolution, war, and dictatorship is coming apart on Iran’s streets. Woman, Life, Freedom is a chant for all marginalized groups that have faced persecution under the Islamic government, and it has galvanized people from across Iranian society. the fight for women’s rights in Iran today also encompasses the historic struggle for Kurdish rights, which has grown as the regime’s military forces laid siege to Mahabad, Sanandaj, and other Kurdish cities and strongholds in late November, opening fire on protesters, arresting citizens en masse, and killing with impunity. Woman, Life, Freedom is an epochal rallying cry, in the vein of “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It means that if women do not have freedom, and if Kurds do not have freedom, then no one in Iran can be free. Some have been surprised by how rapidly these demonstrations have overtaken the country. But Iranians have been just a tremor away from the fight for liberation from the theocratic dictatorship for some time; they have been fighting, both loudly and quietly, for more than four decades. Iranian cinema offers a vital portal into this historic struggle. It captures the pulse of civilian life under the traumatic duress of dictatorship, and it reveals how close the people always are to revolution. there is an undercurrent of fearlessness and dissidence that runs beneath the framework of Iranian society. Hopelessness is never final, and repressed fury is always ready to bubble to the surface and burst.