What Could Have Been Asked

The law is a pliable thing. Those who know its ins and outs can bend the rules in their favour, silence whoever threatens to disrupt the order, trap them in a thicket of contradictions. From inside that thicket, the law closes in on itself, begins to appear unyielding and rigid. Someone has made an irreversible decision about the fate of another, and no matter how hard you, this person both outside the law and swallowed by it, try to kick in the walls, the ruling is final.

Steffi Niederzoll’s new documentary pulls its viewers right into the devastation this Janus-faced nature can wreak: Seven Winters in Tehran reconstructs the case of Reyhaneh Jabbari, an Iranian teenager imprisoned in 2007 for stabbing a man who attempted to assault her. In line with the view held by government critics, the film suggests that police, government officials and judges manipulated the case in order to shield the posthumous reputation of Jabbari’s would-be rapist, a former member of the Secret Service. The young woman’s act of self-defence was portrayed as the rage-fuelled murder of a lover; she was sentenced to death and eventually hanged in 2014, despite international protests against her imprisonment and execution.

Niederzoll tells this story in the style of a classic documentary. She pieces together the past through interviews with Jabbari’s parents, friends, and her lawyer, snippets of home videos from happier times, shaky footage taken outside detention facilities and inside government offices. Another woman’s voice reads out letters and notes jotted down in custody, which tell Jabbari’s story in her own words. Gaps in the image supply are patched with slow shots of a textured wall or close-ups of a prison cell and a courtroom in miniature. When the writing describes assault and stabbing, the camera pans over the empty interior of a luxury apartment, as if this was the actual site of the incident.

Viewers learn right away that the woman is dead. She announces her imminent killing in a recorded phone call, addressing the world outside the prison: “I’m 26 years old, I’m about to be hung.” What follows is a film that encircles Jabbari as a predetermined absence, like a True Crime show might grasp at the thin air left by a dead girl found in the ditch.

Here lies the issue with Niederzoll’s approach. Its conservative form, lacking a single moment of refraction or irritation, drains all subversive potential from the subject. Seven Winters in Tehran hones in on Jabbari, while at the same time failing to grant her a presence free from stereotypes of the courageous, beautiful, but ultimately doomed heroine. The film revels in the eerie traces Jabbari has left, the letters, phone calls and nostalgic video tapes, the tears that well up as someone close to her recounts a detail. It induces the familiar shudders of imagining how a woman may be raped, murdered, stripped of her rights – shudders that are also somehow comforting, as evidenced by the unquenchable thirst for detective shows, True Crime podcasts, and Twin Peaks re-runs.

Seven Winters is based, the prologue informs viewers, on “secretly recorded video and sound material that was smuggled out of Iran” at the risk of at least five years in prison. A work that declares itself to be a subversion of the state should, at best, have more to say about the amalgam of law, religion, and patriarchy that reigns in Iran. It could scrutinise the specific constellation in which a girl, deemed ‘ready for a modern, 21st century life’, comes up against a fundamentalist government. It could ask whether the latter’s fervent anti-modern stance, the embrace of practices like blood revenge, may not firmly be a product of modernity. It could even, in this context, consider how economic colonialism – exerted in Iran mainly through the extraction of the country’s oil resources by companies such as BP – literally fuelled a “Western” modernity which some Iranians in turn violently refuted. From there, such a film would be able to look outwards, ask a question about Iran that is also a question about the world at large: when ideologies are at war, who is the first to be torn to pieces?