Ahangarani Debuts 'Rehearsals for a Revolution' Iran Doc
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- "Rehearsals for a Revolution" marks Pegah Ahangarani's feature directorial debut, a five-chapter documentary essay chronicling 40-plus years of post-Revolutionary Iran through her family's personal and political history.
- Chapter 1 ("For my Father") traces Ahangarani's father Jamshid Ahangarani from enthusiastic support of the 1979 Revolution and Khomeini to disillusionment, with on-screen text noting that between 1980 and 1988, more than 200,000 Iranians were killed in the Iran-Iraq war and over 15,000 political prisoners were executed and buried in mass graves.
- Chapter 3 centers on Ahangarani's youngest uncle Rashid (1978–1999), a student journalist and supporter of President Khatami whose death coincided with the end of a brief reform era marked by newspaper closures, violent protest crackdowns, and the arrest of more than a thousand people.
- Chapter 4 documents Ahangarani's activism for Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in 2009; her involvement led to brief arrests in 2009 and 2011, after which she left Iran and now lives in the U.K.
- Chapter 5 ("For Lily"), dedicated to her daughter, contemplates the massacres of early 2026, which human rights groups estimate killed tens of thousands, and frames Iranians as trapped between internal repression and a forced war.
- The film draws on personal family material, cell phone video, news footage, and an animated cartoon, with Ahangarani narrating around the Iranian concept of yād — memory and the way the past returns to mark the present.
Why it matters: The film bears witness to protest crackdowns that the source notes are largely hidden from view inside Iran and abroad due to state media control. Its final chapter tackles massacres of early 2026 with a death toll estimated in the tens of thousands, making this debut from a three-decade acting veteran a rare insider's visual record of four decades of Iranian political trauma.
