I FLED IRAN TO ESCAPE 99 LASHES Sunday Times Culture 22 January, 2023
When Zar Amir Ebrahimi accepted the award for best actress at Cannes last year, her voice quivered with emotion as she said: "This film is about women, their bodies, faces, hair, hands, feet, breasts, sex - everything that is impossible to show in Iran." There was a lot riding on this moment. Not only had she won for her role in a film about a true-life serial killer in one of Iran’s holy cities that would provoke outrage in her native country, but she was also carrying the emotional baggage of her own immensely dramatic backstory that led to her exile from Iran.
In Holy Spider, Amir Ebrahimi, 41, plays a fictional journalist investigating the deaths of 16 prostitutes killed by a construction worker in the city of Mashhad from 2000 to 2001. Misogyny is prevalent at every turn. She was “inspired”, she tells me over Zoom from Los Angeles, by her own experience of having to flee from Iran as a fugitive in 2008, two years after what she describes as “an intimate video” of herself with her then boyfriend was stolen from her flat and circulated on the internet.
At the time, Amir Ebrahimi was one of Iran’s most popular actresses, known for safe family dramas such as Narges that in one case was even deemed moral enough to air during Ramadan -- and this is a country where television is the main platform for state propaganda. “When I got into trouble with this video leak, the government was so angry and mad with me because I represented the image of their TV somehow,” explains Amir Ebrahimi. Now, with her hair worn free in a loose bob and wearing large black spectacles and a black zipped and pleated top, she looks like any other fashion-conscious 41-year old.
The film was widely distributed in street markets and posted on websites at a time when the then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was on a crusade against western culture. Her parents, she says, were ordered to keep her isolated in their house while the scandal was investigated. To avoid a potential punishment of 99 lashes for sex between unmarried people, at first she denied she was the woman depicted in the video, widely dubbed a ‘sex tape’ (not her preferred choice of words), and said it was faked by a vengeful ex-fiance.
“In the beginning my parents were really shocked and frightened for me, but both of them are very amazing and brave,” says Amir Ebrahimi, whose father comes from an aristocratic Persian family. “They said to me: ‘We are going to support you.’ They talked to a lawyer for me, they were always trying to help me to stay alive. Although I think this story destroyed them somehow because of all these worries that parents always have for their children. It was not easy for them, but they never asked me why I recorded the video.”
Eventually she decided to own up, whereupon the country’s morality police tried to blackmail her into being an informer on friends and colleagues -- with no success. The morning of her trial, she escaped on a flight to Azerbaijan and then went on to Paris, where she has lived in exile ever since; she was found guilty in absentia.
What her story highlights is the West’s common misconception about repressive regimes where underground worlds do in fact flourish. In Masshad, the holy city where Holy Spider is set, drugs pour over the nearby border with Afghanistan. This is reflected in the film, where many of the sex workers are drug addicts. And many Iranians do make “intimate videos”, she says. “I have travelled a lot during my 15 years of exile and I think I never saw as much party[ing], as much sex and drugs and alcohol as I saw in Iran,” says Amir Ebahami. “When you try to ban everything for people, the opposite usually happens.”
I suggest that if God created the human body, there is nothing shameful about showing it as a form of self-expression. “This is what I think too,” she says. “The human body was created by God, I have nothing to be ashamed of. I love naked paintings: there is nothing more beautiful. And the night that I did it [the video], I was young, in my 20s, really excited and really in love. It was not a sex tape, it was just something for our memories, something very special for our love,’ says the actress, who is a believer but comes from a liberal background. “But in the Islamic religion, the body is something very problematic,” she claims. “Body, hair, skin, everything. All girls in school are always taught that we should be covered up - and then in the street, some guy wants to touch you, so you think that maybe my body just makes a problem, so maybe just hide it. And then you come home and your parents don’t believe in these things. The image of Iran coming from its government and media is one-dimensional, whereas it’s actually a very complicated country. Some of its Muslims don’t even pray.”
The murderer Saeed Hanaei, nicknamed “Spider Killer” in the press, became a folk hero to the religious right for claiming to be on a holy mission to cleanse the city of prostitution. Yet Amir Ebrahimi detests the demonisation of women selling their bodies because of poverty and says that the “nice” judge in the film, who shows some compassion for the victims during the killer’s trial, is not typical. “In reality none of them is nice,” she snaps.
A French citizen since 2017, she keeps in touch with her father, mother and younger brother back in Iran. However, reunions have been difficult to arrange. “I saw my father again after nine years, but the visa application to come to Paris takes so much time and my parents don’t travel that much. But I have no regrets: exile for me turned out as a chance, an adventure. I learned French and how to edit and produce movies and open my own company (Alambic Production).”
As well as being a BBC host for World Service programmes, she appeared alongside Billie Eilish, Ukraine’s Olena Zelenska and the actresses Priyanka Chopra Jonas on the Corporation’s 100 Women list for the world’s most inspiring and influential women. Her Cannes triumph she recalls as “a beautiful night, a message of hope and justice,” although her new worldwide profile brought her more than 200 threats – including a chilling post-award condemnation of Holy Spider’s makers from Iran’s Ministry of Culture for ‘following the path set by Salman Rushdie [for The Satanic Verses].’
Her latest project, the title role in the Australian drama Shayda, is executive-produced by Cate Blanchett and premieres at Sundance this month. Meanwhile she hopes to go back to her homeland “to direct in future” if there is the regime change that so many Iranians are now demanding with mass protests following the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini in police custody. As she admits, “I have too many story ideas that are somehow still based on there…”