Jaii keh khoda nist

In an empty room on the edge of Paris, a prison cell is under construction. Director Mehran Tamadon is putting together a scaffold of wooden slats to mark out the walls and bunk beds. He’s talking to Homa Kalhori, who is busy painting prison bars on the wall and corrects him when the space he is constructing gets too large. She says the cells at Ghezel Hesar were much smaller: eight square metres for 25 to 30 women. It is years since Tamadon has been in Iran. He himself was never imprisoned, although his passport was confiscated for a month after he filmed Iranien. By speaking with Kalhori and two other former political prisoners – Taghi Rahmani and Mazyar Ebrahimi – he is now looking to find out more about the years they spent in Evin or Ghezel Hesar. Over the course of the trio’s reconstructions and reenactments, they place their bodies back in the positions they took during their interrogation and torture. Will this enable them to convey their experiences? Is it helpful for them to return to the past? Providing no easy answers to these difficult questions, the film instead takes the liberty of repeatedly eyeing its own premise with quiet scepticism. (Berlinale)