Mehran Tamadon

For three years, Mehran Tamadon immersed himself into the very heart of the most extremist supporters of the Islamic republic of Iran (the Bassidjis) to understand their ideas.

Mojtaba, Hamzeh, Zar are among other individuals who have been thrown into prison and ideologically interrogated in Iran. In this documentary, the director wants them to interrogate him as agents of the Islamic Republic might. He would like the real torturer in Iran to see himself through the film as if in a mirror. The violent experience of putting themselves in the torturer's head confronts them with their own limits and the ambivalence of the project itself.

A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.

An atheist, Iranian filmmaker Mehran Tamadon managed to convince four mullahs, all believers in the Islamic Republic of Iran, to come and stay with him for two days and engage in discussion. In this confined space, daily life is combined with debate, an unremitting demonstration of the problematic issue of how to live together, when each side's understanding of the world is so contrary?