GREAT MAINTENANCE. "Iran is experiencing profound transformations that the regime is incapable of stopping" : a director gives a voice to Iranian youth
Cairo: Hani Kamal El-Din
One year after his film Afghans, director Solène Chalvon-Fioriti immersed herself in another very closed country. In the documentary We, the youth of Iran, broadcast on Sunday April 21 on France 5, it paints the portrait of a new multifaceted Iranian generation, connected, politicized, feminist or conservative, but always eager for freedom. Thanks to the testimony of six Iranians under the age of 25, the film reveals the profound changes in the country, in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini and the protest movement that followed. The production of this documentary was made possible by the use of artificial intelligence, which made it possible to anonymize faces and protect young witnesses, who, whatever their opinions, live under a regime which prohibits everyone to address foreign media. The director returns, for franceinfo, to the very particular production of her documentary.
Franceinfo: Your film gives a voice to six young Iranian men and women, and shows their daily lives. Were you able to go to Iran to meet them and make this documentary?
Solène Chalvon-Fioriti: No, my visa has always been refused, I have never been able to go to Iran. So I directed this shoot remotely, with non-professionals. There are almost no more professionals [du documentaire] in Iran: the cameramen are either in prison or followed by the regime and on file, so it was impossible to make them work. We identified people who wanted to learn how to film and we gravitated towards them. We trained the main narrator, Sarah, and two other young women, a hairdresser and a wedding photographer, for filming.
I taught them to frame using secure messaging, with ephemeral messages that automatically delete every 24 hours. We had to be sure that in the event of an arrest, these messages would disappear so that they would not be worried. This is why the film took a particularly long time to make: this entire training part took place in very poor communication conditions, with the State regularly blocking the internet. We started filming in November 2022, so it took over a year. What I wanted to show in my film is that the “Woman, Life, Liberty” movement was a shock wave for everyone. And, above all, it gave us the opportunity to see these Iranian youth in the face.
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