James Y. Lee
Iranian cinema has proven, with virtually incomparable frequency and ferocity, the impact of cinema as a tool for meaningful activism and social change. Last year, the release of Mohammad Rasolouf’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig brought with it the news that Rasolouf had exiled himself from Iran after charges laid against him by the Iranian government, directly related to the film in questions, were threatening his arrest. And just this year, Jafar Panahi—one of the most renowned filmmakers of his time, who the Iranian government has jailed on multiple occasions, and who had to smuggle his films out to festival premieres—received the Palme D’Or for his latest work, It Was Just an Accident.
But even examining the scope of Iranian film of the past few decades, there are countless examples of directors speaking out in some form against the Iranian regime’s oppressive disregard for human rights; Panahi’s son, Panah Panahi, released Hit the Road, a tale of a family on the journey to send their eldest child out of the country for reasons that have caught him under the Iranian government’s watchful eye. Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider tells the true-crime story of virulently misogynistic serial killer Saeed Haenei, and how he was enabled by an equally misogynistic media ecosystem and institutional set of norms. And Asghar Farhadi’s winding morality tales, including A Separation and A Hero, are examinations of how a culture influenced by authoritarian influence and intense religious oversight can threaten to upend domestic lives.
So it’s interesting to consider Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari’s An Eye for an Eye as a documentary entry in the dissident canon of Iranian cinema; one that peels apart in real time the harrowing ramifications behind a murder case and how the absence of forgiveness threatens to tear apart a family at the seams. The foundations of the case are simple; long abused by a husband who terrorized her family, a woman named Tahereh killed her husband in self-defense and wound up serving 14 years in prison. Upon being released, Tahereh and her side of the family face a harrowing conundrum; her in-laws have been given the option to either execute her or receive a payment in exchange for forgiveness—referred to as “blood money”—and thus begins a major struggle for Tahereh’s family, where, with the help of anti-execution activists while staring down a torrent of resentment held by their in-laws, they’re forced to find a way to bargain for Tahereh’s life.
The question of reciprocal justice hangs large over this film—the thin line and dilemma between forgiveness and retribution, where an eye for an eye can make the whole world blind, but to forgo vengeance requires inhuman levels of discipline and restraint. The two familial sides of this coin are relatively well-represented throughout as they both have to grapple with that question; for Tahereh’s family, they’re desperate to try and do anything to keep her alive, but she herself is completely resistant to any notion of receiving forgiveness, having seemingly let go of any hope that she’s going to be kept alive for much longer. Her daughters and her son, Mohsen, continually advocate for her survival, and when the option arises for them to amass funds for blood money, it’s Mohsen’s desperation that makes up a key portion of the emotional struggle this film centers around.
On the other side of the coin, Tahereh’s in-laws have been left in nothing short of total emotional ruin, and fourteen years later, forgiveness still largely remains out of the question. Bashir, Tahereh’s brother-in-law, is the one tasked with the pivotal decision over her life, choosing not to budge over the insurmountable sum of blood money he’s set for Tahereh’s family, and Bashir’s mother has repeatedly expressed that she wants to see Tahereh dead regardless. It’s easy for a documentary like this to vilify Bashir and his mother considering the option of executing Tahereh and vengefully leaving her side of the family in the same desolation, despite knowing what her husband did to her. And yet, there’s a real sense of impact in watching a film instead choose to build an understanding on how this murder has decimated any sense of normalcy for this side of the family, and yet how the money they receive from Tahereh’s family could still help their current situation.
The clash that results is deeply ugly. Mohsen, who failed to understand Tahereh’s murder at the time, is now the strongest advocate to keep her alive, litigating her situation to religious authorities, to the anti-execution activists, and even to Bashir’s side of the family. Meanwhile, it’s hard to get a read on what exactly it would take for Bashir and his mother to forgive Tahereh, and even if that would be possible in the first place; which a documentary like this draws a lot of impact from, because no audience member can dramatically telegraph where this real-life story is going, and these people are not characters on a set narrative path. But there are some interesting holes in the documentary’s construction; as a result of its singular focus on how this murder has split this family apart, it only scratches the surface of the grander systemic functions at play that led this family to such a dire point.
Perhaps part of that is the point. Examining the societal workings behind an authoritarian system that allows for a family to tear each other apart in this manner might not have as much immediacy for anyone involved in the case as it may have 14 years ago, when Tahereh was initially arrested and jailed. And while most true crime documentaries may have chosen to dig deep into the details of Tahereh’s murder—including her motivations and finding the definitive truth amid conflicting retellings of it amid her own family—An Eye for an Eye passes over most of these details in exchange for telling a story about how these details may have become totally irrelevant in the wake of the decade and a half’s worth of devastation that’s led up to the moment this film captures.
Yet, one way or another, this is still a story about how institutionalized misogyny led to Tahereh being repeatedly unable to defend herself against her abuser, both during his life and after his death. It’s also the story of a system that gives the in-laws the jurisdiction to hold someone’s life in their hands, one that allows them to wield the death penalty in one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world. It’s also a story where, watching it, you wonder about the documentarians’ role in the construction of this story; they’re not just a film crew surrounding a story, but rather people tasked with the documentation of real people’s circumstances, who could have had some kind of direct involvement outside of filming them.
The former two are about grander societal problems in Iran that are largely left assumed; the lattermost is a real point of moral intrigue, and maybe the most demonstrable indication that a film like this, even with a focus of genuine intention, can still feel incomplete. For a film that explores this story for under 90 minutes, more afforded runtime could have left a further impact—and giving itself room for further investigation and more thorough ethical balancing would have allowed this story to flourish. Within its limitations, it’s a harrowingly well-told story about how a family struggles to keep itself together, but the wealth of potential outside of its confines is left too unexplored for it to leave a sizable dent.
