Roya
The Iranian state has imprisoned her body; now it wants her innermost self. Under torture, can a rebel teacher defend her values, emotions and memories?
Iranian teacher Roya (Melisa Sözen, Winter Sleep) is a political prisoner, detained and humiliatingly tortured after her students burned their hijabs. The regime offers her two options: make a televised confession falsely denouncing her beliefs; or face indefinite solitary confinement in her tiny prison cell. But for Roya, choice and coercion blur as she drifts between memories, interrogators’ lies and isolation-driven hallucinations. Is her family really at risk if she doesn’t confess? Is her silence resilience, or will it only confirm her guilt? Will confessing end the terror, or bring it inside forever?
Director Mahnaz Mohammadi has been repeatedly arrested for defending Iranian women’s rights; like her protagonist, she spent months in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Premiering in Berlinale’s Panorama section, her empathetic drama refuses to reinterrogate Roya through the camera’s objectifying gaze. Instead, visceral point-of-view sequences and dreamlike voyages into Roya’s defiant past and bruised present honour the dissident mind’s struggle against authoritarian power.
“Formally risky in ways that both immerse and unsettle … Roya is most devastating as a portrait of prison as psychological – constructed from isolation, coercion and the slow dismantling of identity itself. You can’t get more political and more timely.” – IONCINEMA.com
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