Meytham Ale Mahdi was working for the National Steel Group in 2018 when Iran’s economy collapsed and unemployment reached 60%. As wages went unpaid for months and life became increasingly impossible, Mahdi did what so many Iranians have done during 45 years of authoritarian rule: he took to the streets. The protests spread across the country and expanded into an organised strike movement. The hunger for change in Iran was, once again, insatiable.
Then came the crackdown. Mahdi was arrested, interrogated and forced to confess that he was a separatist leading the riots. He was ordered to tell the workers to stop striking. But when he returned to the protests, the fear he had experienced in the interrogation room evaporated. Mahdi smiles as he recalls the speech he made that day: “Together we can stand against all the powers. We are like raindrops, but together we turn into the sea.” After he spoke those words, he never went home again. In exile, he scrolls through photos of his children, who were seven and nine when he fled Iran five years ago. “Is there any suffering greater than this?” he asks.
We Are Like Raindrops is the title of the first episode of Rage Against the Regime: Iran, an extraordinary, spare and harrowing two-part documentary telling some of the individual stories behind the mass anti-government protests in the country. It moves from the contested election of 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected and, as the former BBC Persian journalist Rana Rahimpour puts it, “the hope many Iranians had was killed”, to Bloody November in 2019, the most brutal crackdown by security forces in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “It was a massacre,” says the activist and former political prisoner Adnan Hassanpour. “There is no going back to before November 2019.”
The second film, focusing on the women who led the 2022 “woman, life, freedom” uprisings against the regime’s mandatory hijab law, is called Good Girls. The documentaries, directed by James Newton, are filmed simply and starkly, with eyewitnesses giving testimony against the backdrop of a Persian rug hung on the wall, alongside footage from the protests. Both films open with a statement explaining that everyone who has taken part is living in self-exile from Iran and closes with a statement saying the BBC put the allegations to the government of Iran, which has not responded.
We may have followed the heartbreaking cycles of “death and protests, death and protests”, as Rahimpour describes it, but in these films we watch up close the lives destroyed by the regime. Mersedeh Shahinkar, a young woman who was shot in the face by security forces while sitting at a bus stop, puts it this way: “We gave our eyes for freedom.” Each person’s bravery, for what they have stood up against and for recounting it here, is breathtaking to witness. Another contributor – who unknowingly married an undercover member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), spent five years in US federal prisons and has become one of the first insiders to accuse the IRGC of corruption – says: “Me being alive and taking this interview with you guys today … I consider it a miracle. I should have been killed years ago.”
At the start of the films, the interviewees are handed a photo. In We Are Like Raindrops, it shows Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The reason for all our miseries,” one contributor responds. In Good Girls, the photo shows a woman walking down a street in Iran without a hijab. The interviewer asks: “What do you see?” A young woman, Zeinab Sahafy, replies: “A girl who has the wind in her hair. Be afraid, Islamic Republic.” She smiles. Next question: “Did you know she got flogged 70 times for this photo?” “No,” Sahafy replies. “When?” A few weeks ago.
Sahafy’s story is incredible. “Football, for me, is the essence of life,” she says as we see her applying makeup to look like stubble, binding her chest and tying her hair back. This is what she would do in Tehran before sneaking into the local football stadium, from which women are effectively banned. She was arrested about 15 times and started filming herself at matches and posting the videos online. When a friend called and said: “They’re looking for you,” she grabbed her passport, books and Persepolis football shirts and fled to Turkey. A few days later, she saw the news that a woman who had been arrested after being refused entry to a football match had set fire to herself at her trial and died. “The amount of pressure you can be under is too much,” says another contributor, tears streaming down her face. “Setting yourself on fire is actually easier than living in Iran as a woman.”
These are astonishing stories of resistance – resistance of the most immense kind, when everything is at stake. Yet still the Iranian people stand up, hold headscarves aloft, block the roads with their cars, take to the streets, refuse to be silenced. The least the rest of us can do is bear witness to their overwhelming courage, which is why watching these documentaries while the regime remains in power is so distressing – and necessary.
• Rage Against the Regime: Iran airs on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
