22/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: In his second Berlin-screened documentary about perpetrators and victims of torture at the hands of the Iranian regime, Mehran Tamadon is interrogated by actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi

After Where God Is Not [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mehran Tamadon
film profile] bowed in the Berlinale's Forum section, the other part of Iranian director Mehran Tamadon's informal diptych, My Worst Enemy [+see also:
trailer
interview: Mehran Tamadon
film profile], has world-premiered in the Encounters competition. More stripped-down and confrontational, this documentary goes even deeper into the issue of the responsibility of the filmmaker as famous actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi stepsintotherole of an interrogatorto challenge the director.

In his voice-over, Tamadon explains that his passport was confiscated by the authorities and that he has “devised a plan” to return to the country: he will make a film in which a former prisoner will interrogate him, and when he arrives and is arrested, the officer who does so will see his film. This is, on the surface, an even more naive framing device than the one in Where God Is Not, and journalist Taghi Rahmani, one of the three protagonists of that previous film, returns to tell him as much, when the director asks him if these torturers have a conscience.

At first, a couple of other former prisoners try their hand at interrogating Tamadon, but they are too traumatised – and humane – to go very far. But Ebrahimi, best known for her Cannes award-winning role in Holy Spider [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Zar Amir Ebrahimi
film profile], seems to have fewer qualms. The actress herself was never imprisoned but was interrogated every day for a year following the leak of a private sex tape. For one intense hour, we stay with her and Tamadon in the bare rooms of a house that he has rented for this purpose.

She starts off by questioning him about his work as a filmmaker and his link to a film professional whom he had a relationship with and worked with on Iranian [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. This line soon veers into sexual territory, Tamadon chuckling uncomfortably as she orders him to strip. Now in his boxer shorts only, we can tell the director is starting to get the picture.

After a segment in which Ebrahimi showers him with cold water and forces him to walk almost naked down a (luckily, or by design, deserted) Paris street to a cemetery (for Iranian, Tamadon interviewed mothers of martyrs at a Tehran graveyard) for another round of questioning, we go into the final, most revealing and squirm-inducing stretch of the film.

After spending the night in a locked room and still in his wet boxer shorts, Tamadon is now walking up and down the stairs in the house as Ebrahimi gets more involved in her role, now infusing it with notions that will inevitably come to audiences’ minds, too. “Is it right to make people suffer in the name of cinema?” and “You are the one who is torturing us with this silly little game!” she yells at him.

This “exercise” was, of course, more about Ebrahimi's experience in the two-day interrogation than Tamadon's. Crucially, the picture manages to reveal the mechanism through which torturers lose their humanness and viscerally answers the question about conscience that Tamadon asked Rahmani. For the audience, spending an hour with a simulation of an interrogation could be trying or even excruciating, depending on their sensibilities, but it provides for an unparalleled moment of realisation. The claustrophobic setting with the bare rooms and two people in a scary power game may not possess the cinematic dazzle of The Act of Killing [+see also:
trailer
film profile] or The Look of Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], but it does bring us closer to the truth. Coupled with Where God Is Not, My Worst Enemy may not turn any evil-doer from the Iranian regime around, but it will certainly enlighten audiences bold enough to accept this threatening proposition.

My Worst Enemy is a co-production by France's L'atelier documentaire and Switzerland's Box Productions, with Andana Films handling the international rights.