CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques Rage Against The Regime: Iran on BBC2: Terrifying testimonies of Iranian exiles residing in concern for his or her lives
Rage Against the Regime: Iran (BBC 2)
Have we started? Are you filming already? I’m not ready, please wait while I sit down . . . OK. Now we can begin.
This TV technique, showing interviewees arriving on set before the questions start to fly, has become ubiquitous over the past few years. You’ll see it in everything from political documentaries to pop retrospectives and reality shows.
Sometimes, it’s used as a device to poke fun, when a pompous talking head is caught slurping his coffee or tucking his shirt in. More usually, it’s a way of reminding viewers that the person they’re about to hear is a real human being, with a life beyond the screen.
Maybe it began with YouTube and amateur video bloggers, editing their clips so we see them switching on their phone cameras before sitting back and talking. It emphasises that they’re ordinary people, working alone, not professionals with a film crew.
But it’s overused, and a distraction when the material is as shocking and absorbing as the testimonies in the two-part Rage Against The Regime: Iran. Director James Newton should have trusted his subjects, all now living in exile and afraid for their lives, to engage our attention with the power of their stories.
A young woman called Kiana described how she fled a pro-democracy march after police used pepper spray and tear gas. Taking refuge on an overpass, she looked down to see a man she recognised, one of the protest leaders, draw a knife and stab the teenage boy next to him.
‘I saw the whole thing — I mean, I saw the blood coming out of his body and everything,’ she said, her voice numb with disbelief. ‘And the guy went off and joined the other policemen. He was an undercover cop for sure.’
In the BBC documentary, Zeinab Sahafy reveals she dressed as a man to secretly attend football matches in Iran
Sima Moradbeigi, who was shot in the arm during the 2022 protests, in Iran. Footage of anti-government riots was inevitably poor quality, videoed in secret amid the chaos at great personal risk
A man named Meysam Al-Mahdi explained how Arab people like him were forced into the toughest and most dangerous jobs, such as steel production, because of their low social status in Iran.
He was imprisoned and tortured for joining demonstrations, but managed to escape by consenting to film a false confession — then went straight back on to the protest lines, with reckless courage.
Footage of anti-government riots was inevitably poor quality, videoed in secret amid the chaos at great personal risk. The sight of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on ranks of motorbikes, like a modern-day cavalry charge, was terrifying.
The witnesses, including former BBC reporter Rana Rahimpour, were articulate and impassioned.
Two were doctors — one fled the country after he was filmed treating a woman who had been shot through the throat at a demo over rigged elections, the other had seen his own brother die.
Worst of all were the descriptions of Iranian prisons, too horrific to be detailed here. The name of one outside Tehran, Kahrizak Detention Centre, has become a byword for ‘Hell’ or ‘the end of the world’.
‘Every single day of it felt like 1,000 years,’ said a former political prisoner, weeping. ‘There’s not a single night I forget it.’
