Mahnaz Mohammadi Premieres Prison Drama 'Roya' in London
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- Mahnaz Mohammadi has been arrested multiple times in Iran, including in 2011 when she was held for months in solitary confinement at Evin prison and tortured, and in 2014 when she was sentenced to five years.
- "Roya", her new fictional drama starring Turkish actress Melisa Sözen, tells the story of a university professor accused of inciting students to burn their headscarves; Mohammadi cast a non-Iranian to avoid endangering local actors.
- Mohammadi shot the film's exterior scenes in Iran without official permission and the prison scenes in Tbilisi, Georgia; she has been banned from making films in Iran since her 2019 feature debut "Son-Mother."
- Jafar Panahi had a one-year prison sentence upheld by Tehran's revolutionary court earlier this month on propaganda charges, while Mohammad Rasoulof fled to Germany in 2024 after an eight-year sentence and flogging for "The Seed of the Sacred Fig."
- Mohammadi's recent documentary "Beyond the Lies" documents the regime's violent suppression of the November 2019 protests, and she is currently directing a Channel 4 documentary about women in Iran.
- Mohammadi, 51, said she plans to return to Iran after her three-year European visa expires, telling the interviewer: "The Islamic republic is finished."
Why it matters: Mohammadi's defiance — premiering a film about her own Evin prison torture while banned from filmmaking since 2019 — comes as Panahi was just sentenced to a year in prison and Rasoulof fled to Germany in 2024. Iranian cinema's most prominent directors are now making work in exile, from London to Tbilisi, with stories about the regime no longer being produced inside Iran.
