Dispatch from Berlinale 2023: Seven Winters in Tehran Is Riddled With Cruel Ironies

A powerful, piercing documentary about an Iranian woman whose voice is stifled  — and the ultimate cost of her reclaiming it — Seven Winters In Tehran begins with a chilling bit of narration. “I want to tell my story,” begins 26-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari, who is to be hanged on the charge of murder, “...and if they wish, they can pull the rope tighter around my neck.” There’s a defiance there, but also a devastating resignation. Reyhaneh may have been sentenced to death, but as the documentary gradually reveals, her life ceased to make sense a long time ago. 

At 19, the interior decorator was lured into the apartment of plastic surgeon Dr. Sarbandi on the pretext of helping him redesign his clinic. When he attempted to rape her, she stabbed him in self-defense. He died, she would spend the rest of her life behind bars. Through interviews with her family and former cellmates, German director Steffi Niederzoll pieces together the seven years of Reyhaneh’s imprisonment and eventual death sentence. What emerges as the larger picture is not only an indictment of Iranian law and culture, in which women are scapegoated, but also a harrowing personal account that speaks to the universal fears ingrained into women.  

Despite the story’s threads of psychological torture, destroyed evidence and transferred judges, the documentary resists mining these topics for their thriller potential. In one scene, as Reyhaneh’s former cellmate arranges to meet the girl’s mother to discuss her suspicions of phone-tapping, the accompanying visual is that of a park in broad daylight, the children playing and laughing. These scenes of ordinary, everyday Iranian life, interspersed with those in which Reyhaneh’s case is discussed, point to a city in which life must go on despite the innumerable threats to it. Niederzoll’s juxtaposition of images and audio contrast the facade of a run-of-the-mill society with the horrors that it conceals. With every shot of sprawling vistas and open skies, she reinforces what Reyhaneh can only imagine from the confines of her cell. Gray models of prison barracks pinpoint a loneliness made more acute with each scene of a loving home video shot by her family.

Seven Winters in Tehran also calls to mind last year’s release, Holy Spider, which captured, in dread-inducing detail, the crimes of serial killer Saeed Hanei, who murdered 16 sex workers in Iranian city Mashhad between 2000 and 2001. This overlap extends far beyond the movie’s actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi providing Reyhaneh’s voice in the documentary. In both films, women are victimized, first by men, then by a society that justifies and minimizes these crimes. While Hanei’s status as an Iran-Iraq war veteran fuelled his “calling” as a murderer, Sarbandi’s role as a Secret Service member safeguards his reputation in the public sphere. Unlike Holy Spider, which ended grimly, envisioning Hanaei’s young son re-enacting his crimes and perpetuating the system of violence, Reyhaneh’s mother empathizes with Sarbandi’s son Jalal throughout — it’s he who’s burdened by the decision to sentence Reyhaneh to death. The doctor’s family doesn’t appear in the documentary, but through the eyes of Reyhaneh’s mother, it humanizes them. 

Seven Winters in Tehran is full of cruel ironies. To Reyhaneh, birthdays and New Year celebrations only serve as markers of time spent in incarceration. Her ordeal starts with her being silenced —  Sarbandi tells her that nobody will hear if she makes a sound. In the end, it’s once again her silence, and refusal to absolve Sarbandi of his crimes, that seals her fate and leads his son to stand by her execution. Reyhaneh, whose story is distorted and maligned in the Iranian newspapers, finally reclaims her voice and narrative in telling the truth, only for it to come at a cost. A more heartening parallel, however, emerges. In one scene, Reyhaneh’s father talks about promising to protect her when she was a baby. In the other, her cellmates speak of the courage she gave them to fight their own incarcerations, and finally, lines of text inform the audience that her mother carries on the fight for imprisoned Iranian women. This is a story that began with Reyhaneh’s birth. This is a story that will continue long after her death.