Majed Neisi

In September 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died in police custody. She had been arrested by Iran’s religious police, accused of not wearing her hijab properly. The authorities said she had died of a heart attack, but rumors spread that she had been beaten on arrest. Citizens took to the streets in their thousands in fury. This is an extraordinary and shocking insight into what has been happening across Iran, revealing a regime under huge pressure and resorting to extreme cruelty to control its citizens.

Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story. Drawing from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, she retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history. From the early days of 1979, until the war that began in 2026, she pieces together intimate and collective memories, forming the portrait of a country shaped by political repression and in constant hope for a revolution.

In the frontlines of the war against ISIS, Seyyed Ahmad and Seyyed Jafar lead a group of Shia volunteer fighters in action at the battle for Jorf al-Sakhar, 60 km southwest of Baghdad. These under-equipped but determined volunteers manage to liberate in two days of intense fighting an area that the American forces had all but conceded to Al-Qaeda for over a decade.