When Iranian Zar Amir-Ebrahimi (Tehran, 41) accepted the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in May for her work in Holy Spider, the winner felt poetic justice. “You can’t work for revenge, but with the award in hand, I subconsciously felt a sense of entitlement,” he said via video call last Tuesday from Los Angeles, where he is promoting the thriller for the Oscars.
He has not set foot in Iran for 15 years. She has lived in Paris since 2008, when she fled her home country after releasing a sex tape of her appearance in which she was sentenced to 99 lashes and 10 years in prison. Holy Spider, which opens in Spanish cinemas this Friday, is a diaspora film directed by Ali Abbasi, who emigrated to Denmark, and has a cast that includes exiled Iranian actors and others who lived up to the point of filming have traveled to his country, Jordan, where the city of Mashhad was recreated. But most importantly, it’s the end of a long creative journey, that of Amir-Ebrahimi, who made a living in Europe, earning what he could and enlisting the talent of someone who was one of the great Persian TV stars in 2006. Until what she calls “my special story” happened.
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Holy Spider moves to the rhythm of another courageous woman, a journalist who invades the underworld of Iran’s holy city of Mashhad to catch a serial killer who kills sex workers on the grounds that he’s “walking the streets of sinners.” Between 2000 and 2001, because the script was based on real events, the “spider killer” strangled 16 women before he was caught. Its director, Ali Abbasi, paid tribute to EL PAÍS in Cannes: “It took me many years to get the project off the ground. And when we wanted to shoot in Turkey, the Iranian government interfered in our plans and we returned to our original base, Jordan, from where we fled because of Covid. All in all, my biggest initial mistake was not having Amir-Ebrahimi, my casting director, as the lead actor because I saw the character as having a more powerful body. Luckily, the contract actress left filming a few days after it began and Amir-Ebrahimi replaced her, using all his pent-up anger from the past to build this journalist and improve the film.”
My past is so internalized that I don’t even have to revive it for it to show up in my work
The actress originally chosen dropped out of the project because she refused to film what has become an iconic sequence: When the journalist loses her hijab. What stood out at the Cannes premiere in May is today a message of support for the women who have been leading the revolution on the streets of Iran since last September. “This time I’m optimistic about what’s happening in Iran,” he explains. “For various reasons. Firstly, because from the very beginning there were also men fighting for women’s rights in the demonstrations. This is very important. Secondly, because 40 years have passed since the revolution that overthrew the Shah and now there is a new generation on the streets. The predecessors, like my parents’, said there were bigger problems than the headscarf being imposed, probably because they still carried the fear from four decades ago. Third, this young generation, who is not traumatized, brave, doesn’t let the government manipulate him and knows how to connect with the rest of the world. That they ask? Just freedom, freedom to live. And that’s contagious even to my parents. It will Take time, but now yes, this is the revolution that will triumph”.
The two investigators from “Holy Spider”.
In the validation that Amir-Ebrahimi felt with the award, he affirms, there are several layers: “The first is that all Iranian women have been rewarded in this way, women who oppose their government and against injustices like the ones who I have suffered fighting. And by the way, this government kicked me out of my country’s audiovisual field after my particular story. In 2006, when Iranian soap opera star Amir-Ebrahimi was launching his theater and film career, a 20-minute video leaked showing a couple having sex in a small room. The man being filmed was quick to make his identity public: he was a production assistant who, at the time of shooting in 2004, was engaged to Amir-Ebrahimi, his partner in these pictures, and affirmed that he forgot to delete it when he saw it tat sold his laptop. Thousands of copies of the DVD were made from those 20 minutes, and it ended up on the Internet: an Iranian news website estimates that the company alone exceeded $4 million in physical copies. The film Amir-Ebrahimi wanted to release, Trip to Hidalou, was banned (and has never been seen in his country). The actress has also been fired and replaced in all of her ongoing projects and banned from speaking in public.
From the beginning, the demonstrations also featured men fighting for the rights demanded by women. This is very important”
The investigation did not focus on the leak but on the charges against Amir-Ebrahimi, who fled before the trial began. She was sentenced in absentia to 99 lashes and 10 years in prison, as well as a life ban from acting in Iranian film and television. Her ex-boyfriend was arrested in Armenia and deported to Iran, where he was imprisoned. There were politicians who even called for the actress (not her ex-partner) to be executed by public stoning, and a law was passed that sentenced to death anyone who produced sexual audiovisual material, even if it was a private recording . Over time, it turned out that the revenge leak was another Iranian TV star, Majid Bahrami, who died in 2014.
exile in France
And that’s why Amir-Ebrahimi has a French passport. He has worked on stage in France and in film and television across Europe, as well as producing and presenting a cultural program for the BBC’s Farsi service. With Holy Spider, his global relaunch has arrived. “We knew from the script that we were going to make noise, and because of my particular story, I knew it would provoke government anger,” he recalls. “It carries a message of hope and moves viewers around the world to thank me for my work. It’s funny because I was the casting director, which I’m good at because I don’t see acting as a competition, I see it as a collaboration. Abbasi and I share the same ideas, so after the tests, along with 50 other actresses, we bonded well with the main character. And as the person responsible for casting, I saw more than 500 different performers for the remaining roles.”
Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, with the Best Actress award in Cannes thanks to “Holy Spider”, on May 28th. CLEMENS BILAN (EFE)
As Abbasi says, did he use his past to build the character? “Well, not consciously. I love my country, I understand that talking about Iranian women not only focuses on them, but also talks about life and freedom. Holy Spider illustrates misogyny as the regime controls women’s bodies. I suffered from it, my compatriots too. My past is so internalized that I don’t even have to revive it for it to show up in my work. My experience has also shown me what it means to be a good journalist when you deserve to risk your life for certain things. As a journalist, you have your own voice that you can use. In the end it is a universal story.”
Like the global imbalance that still exists between men and women. When told that in Spain, two days before the interview, four women were murdered in crimes of sexist violence within 24 hours, she smiles wryly: “I insist, it’s a universal story. Think about the movies you see with serial killers chasing women. Unfortunately, the number of murdered women is still gigantic today. It even happens in France and I’ve seen it in other countries. These films are the mirror of society, the most brutal face, the greatest weakness of the existing imbalance between men and women.”
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