Rage Against the Regime: Iran (BBC2)
Teenager Zaniyar feels no anger at the thuggish riot police who blasted his face with a shotgun and left him blind in one eye.
It’s not that he forgives them, or understands why they acted with such brutality during a wave of protests in Iran that left more than 500 dead and many hundreds more maimed.
Zaniyar, 18, who once dreamed of becoming a boxer, has eight pellets too deeply embedded in his head to be removed.
The brain damage these caused, he says, left him unable to express emotion.
He was one of multiple interviewees giving their testimony in the second part of the extraordinary documentary Rage Against The Regime: Iran. Some were blinded, others had lost loved ones or seen people murdered.
One woman was shot in the arm at point blank range by a sadistic policeman who looked her in the eyes as he did it.
The intent, she said, was to inflict injuries that would be a lifelong warning to her and other women: conform, or else.
Zaniyar Tondro, shot in the eye during the 2022 protests in Iran, which began with the death of Mahsa Amini
Zeinab Sahafy,Zeinab Sahafy, Iranian football fan. Zeinab had to disguise herself as a man in order to watch Persepolis FC
Rage Against the Regime tells the story of those who survived antigovernment protests in Iran
These stories should have been horrifying and depressing, and they were.
But the lasting impact of the accounts, expertly compiled and set in the context of Iran’s political history by director James Newton, was to leave us with a sense of hope.
So completely do the Ayatollah and his mullahs in Tehran control the messages coming out of Iran, it’s easy for the West to believe the entire country is a seething mob of fundamentalists dedicated to death and global war.
But these exiles, most of whom fled to avoid imprisonment for daring to protest and who now live in hiding, shared an unswerving confidence that the Islamic Republic was close to collapse — and that democracy would soon assert itself in one of the oldest civilisations on Earth.
Women are the driving force of this change, precisely because they are so oppressed.
The more that ordinary wives and mothers are beaten for failing to cover their hair with a scarf, or gunned down at bus stops for posting videos on social media, the more opposition grows to the 85-year-old ‘supreme leader’, Ayatollah Khamenei, and his morality police.
‘They manage to control everyone by controlling women,’ said Azam, who was forced into an arranged marriage after she fell in love with a man her own mother deemed unsuitable.
Her husband beat her, punching her in the stomach so hard when she was pregnant that she almost lost her baby.
But when she appealed for a divorce, her story was dismissed — because no one else had witnessed the assault.
Some have killed themselves as a protest against the oppression. ‘Setting yourself on fire is actually easier than living in Iran as a woman,’ said a young activist named Kiki, sobbing.
And another exile, who was also left blinded on one side of her face, declared: ‘One eye is enough to see the downfall of a dictator.’ The whole world wants to see that.