Shirin Ebadi: Until We Are Free by Dawn Gifford Engle, a woman of yesterday, today, tomorrow.

"The time for this film is now", declares the American director Dawn Gifford Engle in the director's notes of the documentary Shirin Ebadi: Until We Are Free, dedicated to the figure of the Iranian Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003, first Muslim woman to be awarded such a prestigious global recognition. Shirin, Iranian lawyer and first female president of the Tehran court in 1975, has distinguished herself in the last forty years for having actively fought for the rights of women, children and men against the many limitations imposed by the different regimes that have followed one another. over time in the Persian country. In 1979, with the ousting of the Shah and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Shirin was forced to resign and was not allowed to practice law until 1993. During this period, however, she did not. surrendered, but wrote books and published several articles in Iranian magazines, emerging as a prolific advocate for the rights of women and children, who were not allowed to lead a normal life, as much had happened in the previous phase, when Iran - which since 1935 had taken this name in place of Persia, thus celebrating the ancient “Country of the Arii” with the new name - had gone through a difficult but substantial process of Westernization. After dealing with complicated court cases, among which that of Arin Golshani, a girl who was tortured and killed in the custody of her father, and the evidence presented against some government officials for the killing of a group of students of the University of Tehran, and having suffered serious personal attacks - in 2009 her husband was beaten and forced to leave her and was even seized the Nobel Prize - Shirin has moved permanently to London, where she lives in a sort of voluntary exile, which is not but never sees tames. Shirin Ebadi: Until We Are Free is a documentary film of great political and cultural value. In just 81 minutes he is able to cover the boundless history of the Persian country in great detail - from the antiquity of Cyrus and Alexander the Great to the present day - explaining the political changes that overwhelmed him and how it could have been born, in the dense dust of contemporaneity, the flower of Shirin. From a cinematographic point of view, the image of the flower seems to us to be the most fitting. In fact, everything seems to begin in a magnificent Persian garden, among flowers and fruits that continue to mark the memory of the protagonist. The game of contrast can then easily be unleashed: the dusty and arid earth trampled by violence, the streets of Tehran teeming with rioters, the muffled courtrooms, the apartments spied on by the regime, the sequences of Khomeini's repertoire surrounded by the hypnotized throng of his supporters, in a sudden transition from the clean light of natural truth to the gloomy opacity of dogmatic truth, imposed with the infallible weapon of fear. The editing work is masterly, which puts different and often opposite cinematographic languages ​​in perfect communication, obtaining a harmonious and homogeneous product, albeit hybrid and contaminated: classic documentary interviews, forays into pure animation, details of paintings, majolica or bas-reliefs that seem participate in turn in the animations, Shirin's private videos, a roundup of postcards from the Arab world that mix ancient maps, historical photos, archive images of the protagonist - we see her, in contrast, first in Western clothes and then with the hijab and the chador - in a skilful interweaving of daily life and great History that reveals, perhaps, one of the most profound contents of the work: as Jaques Le Goff stated in La Nuova Storia, if the powerful write it, the simplest individuals can really change it . “The time for this movie is now,” yeah. Today Shirin is 75 years old, and in Iran there is a new regime, strongly related to that of Khomeini. Her story teaches us that the struggle must not stop, that her model is alive and even more relevant, that other women, after her, must continue on her path, without fear of her. That's why the time for this movie is now. That is why now, and only now, action must be taken to secure a new tomorrow. And it may not be just an Iranian story.

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CHAMELEON FILM FESTIVAL